Macedonian live captions and productivity tool for lectures
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Everything you need to follow Macedonian lectures
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Macedonian speakers.
Follow the lecture as it happens
- Captions appear word by word while the lecturer is still speaking
- Works in lecture halls, seminars, and tutorials
- No setup — place the phone on your desk and start
- Any accent, any pace
For courses in another language
- Captions and translates in real time
- For international students or foreign-language courses
- 60+ languages, no switching
- Follow the lecture in the language you read best
Full transcript to study from
- Record the lecture and upload it for a complete written transcript
- Searchable, copyable, shareable
- Review at your own pace after class
- Works on any lecture recording
Key points extracted automatically
- Important concepts and takeaways pulled from any transcript
- Organised into sections — not one continuous block
- Useful for revision and exam preparation
- Works on any saved lecture transcript
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Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Large lecture halls at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje — where foundational courses in law, medicine, and engineering are delivered in standard Macedonian by lecturers from across the country.
Seminars and tutorials in Macedonian departments — small group sessions where students debate quickly in Macedonian, with the informal urban Skopje register departing from formal lecture language.
Online and recorded lectures on Macedonian university platforms — digital content where the Macedonian schwa, invisible to lip-readers, must be resolved entirely by the transcription system.
Study groups in Skopje student accommodation — peer discussion in Macedonian among students from different dialect regions, where vocabulary and stress patterns may differ from the standard the lecturer uses.
International courses and EU-funded programmes at Macedonian universities — where visiting scholars deliver presentations in Macedonian or in English with Macedonian commentary.
Guest speakers at Macedonian cultural institutions — public talks at MANU or the National Library, often broadcast on national television with sign language interpretation but without real-time captions.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
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Built for the pace and pressure of a real lecture
Follow without splitting your attention
Lip-reading and note-taking at the same time is an impossible cognitive load. Captio AI handles the following so you can direct all your attention to understanding what is being said.
Captions while the lecturer is still speaking
Words appear on your screen as they are said — not after the sentence ends. You stay in sync with the lecture rather than always being a beat behind.
Works in any lecture setting
Lecture halls, seminar rooms, online classes, study groups. Place the phone on your desk, point it toward the audio source, and Captio AI handles the rest.
A full transcript to study from
Record the lecture and upload it to Audio Transcription after class. Get a complete written record you can search, annotate, and revise from — at your own pace.
60+ languages
For international students, students studying abroad, or courses taught in a second language. Captio AI captions or translates in real time with no manual setup.
No advance notice needed
Official university captioning requires booking in advance and is not available for every session. Captio AI works for any lecture, any time, with no prior arrangement.
Why Macedonian is hard to understand
Schwa phoneme
- The Macedonian schwa /ə/ is a central near-invisible vowel that carries lexical information
- Standard Macedonian has a phonemic schwa [ə] or [ʌ] — a central, mid, unrounded vowel with the jaw slightly open and the lips neutral. Unlike most Slavic languages, Macedonian uses this vowel to distinguish words. In a lecture at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, a deaf student lip-reading sees almost no lip signal for the schwa — it looks the same as many other neutral vowel positions at speed.
Antepenultimate stress
- Fixed stress creates near-uniform rhythm — useless as a visual word-boundary cue
- Macedonian has a fixed antepenultimate stress rule — stress falls on the third syllable from the end (or first/second in shorter words). While this is predictable, the regularity creates a metronomic rhythm at pace where all stressed syllables have similar visual prominence. A deaf student cannot use stress-pattern variation as a visual word-boundary cue the way they might in a language with contrastive stress.
Affricate pairs
- Macedonian /dz/ and /dʑ/ affricates involve dental contact invisible from the front
- Macedonian phonology includes the voiced dental affricate /dz/ and the voiced palato-alveolar /dʑ/. Both begin with dental or alveolar closure followed by a fricative release, with lip shapes very similar to /d/ followed by a sibilant. A deaf student lip-reading sees what looks like /d/ and misses the brief affricate release, particularly in fast academic speech in a Skopje lecture hall.
Eastern dialect gap
- Eastern Macedonian varieties differ substantially from the Prilep-Bitola standard
- Standard Macedonian is based on the Prilep-Bitola dialect of central Macedonia. Lecturers from eastern Macedonia — Štip, Strumica, or the Bulgarian border zone — speak varieties with different vowel systems, different consonant realizations, and in some areas a moveable stress that departs from the antepenultimate rule. A deaf student calibrated to standard Macedonian encounters a systematically different phonological system in eastern-variety speech.
Macedonian–Albanian contact
- Western Macedonian academic settings involve Macedonian–Albanian code-switching
- In western North Macedonia — Tetovo, Gostivar — the Albanian-speaking population attends universities where Macedonian is the primary academic language but Albanian is widely spoken informally. A deaf student here encounters Macedonian–Albanian code-switching in seminar discussion, and the two languages have entirely different phonological systems with no common lip-reading cues.
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Download on theApp Store6,000 North Macedonians request signed news on national TV — and a 2009 sign language law that mandated interpreter access without building the supply
Macedonian Sign Language (MSL) was formally recognised in 2009 under North Macedonia's Law on Macedonian Sign Language, which mandated that public and private institutions provide qualified interpreters to deaf individuals for healthcare, education, and legal proceedings. The National Association of Deaf Persons of North Macedonia was assigned responsibilities for promoting the language and training interpreters. The precise number of deaf signers is not formally established, but approximately 6,000 people regularly request signed news on Macedonian national television — indicating the minimum scale of the deaf community relying on visual communication.
The gap between legal mandate and practical delivery is significant. The law established that institutions must provide interpreters upon request, but the number of trained and certified MSL interpreters has not grown to meet the needs of a functioning educational system. At Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, deaf students must arrange academic sign language interpretation individually, and specialist academic interpreters for STEM, law, and medical content are in short supply across the country.
North Macedonia has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, with CRPD commitments that include accessible education. The GBD 2019 study estimated approximately 1.57 billion people globally with hearing loss of any degree, with lower-middle income countries facing greater prevalence due to limited audiological screening. For a deaf student at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University following a lecture in Macedonian at speed — with its near-invisible schwa, dental affricates, and dialect variation — Captio AI provides real-time captions that the country's interpreter shortage cannot match.
[1]2009 Macedonia: Legal Recognition of Macedonian Sign Language — Deaf History Europe
[2]Macedonian Sign Language — Wikipedia (6,000 signed news viewers, MSL recognition)
[3]Hearing loss: rising prevalence and impact (PMC6796666)
[4]GBD 2019 — Hearing loss prevalence and years lived with disability (PMC7960691)
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Gone the moment it ends
Captio AI processes your audio in real time and discards it immediately. Nothing is recorded. Nothing is kept.
Not a product
Your conversations are not something Captio AI sells, shares, or monetizes — to anyone, for any reason.
Not used to train anything
What you say in a doctor's appointment or a job interview never ends up in a training dataset. Not ours. Not anyone else's.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"The Macedonian schwa — you cannot see it. A neutral mid-position with no lip signal. Captio AI resolves every schwa in Macedonian academic speech. Skopje lectures are clear now."
"There are no academic sign language interpreters. I filed the request, waited, got nothing. Captio AI means I stopped waiting. Law lectures in Macedonian are the first I've followed completely."
"My lecturer is from eastern Macedonia — completely different vowel system from standard. Captio AI handles every Macedonian regional variety. Bitola engineering seminars are accessible."
"Western Macedonian — Macedonian and Albanian mix in informal seminars. Captio AI handles Macedonian throughout. I follow every formal lecture without missing a word."
"The Macedonian schwa — you cannot see it. A neutral mid-position with no lip signal. Captio AI resolves every schwa in Macedonian academic speech. Skopje lectures are clear now."
"There are no academic sign language interpreters. I filed the request, waited, got nothing. Captio AI means I stopped waiting. Law lectures in Macedonian are the first I've followed completely."
"My lecturer is from eastern Macedonia — completely different vowel system from standard. Captio AI handles every Macedonian regional variety. Bitola engineering seminars are accessible."
"Western Macedonian — Macedonian and Albanian mix in informal seminars. Captio AI handles Macedonian throughout. I follow every formal lecture without missing a word."
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Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Follow every lecture in Macedonian.
Captio AI is free to start
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