Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Romanian live captions and productivity tool for lectures

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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Captio AI app showing live captions

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

🏛️Large lecture halls

Amphitheatres at the University of Bucharest, Babeș-Bolyai Cluj, and the University of Iași — Romanian instruction delivered at academic pace. Captio AI captions the professor in real time.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and laboratory briefings where discussion is in Romanian with English scientific vocabulary. Captio AI handles Romanian and English without manual switching.

💻Online and recorded lectures

Recorded lectures on university portals or Moodle — play on speaker and Captio AI captions whatever is playing in real time.

📚Study groups

Study group sessions in Romanian student dormitories reviewing lecture content. Captio AI captions each contributor in the group.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

Guest lecturers from Transylvania, Moldova, or the diaspora whose Romanian carries regional phonological features. Captio AI handles regional accented Romanian.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

Online courses and webinars delivered by Romanian universities. Captio AI captions any audio source in real time.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Romanian
95.6%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

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Captio AI in everyday use
Why Captio AI

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.

Romanian

Why Romanian is hard to understand

Central vowels

  • Romanian's ă and â produce almost no lip movement — meaning is invisible
  • Romanian has two central vowels unique among Romance languages: /ə/ (ă) and /ɨ/ (â/î). Both are produced with the lips in a near-neutral position, making them nearly invisible. In a Bucharest lecture hall, words distinguished by these vowels — 'pâine' (bread) versus words with ă — look identical on the lips.

Rhotic variation

  • The Romanian /r/ varies from a trill to a tap to a near-zero sound — unpredictably
  • The Romanian rhotic /r/ can be realised as a trill, an alveolar tap, or a fricative depending on the speaker's region and register. In fast academic speech it often reduces to near-zero. For a deaf student, the same consonant position that carried a clear trill in careful speech disappears in the professor's fast delivery.

Transylvanian-Muntenian split

  • Cluj and Bucharest Romanian move the mouth differently for the same words
  • Transylvanian Romanian (Cluj, Sibiu) has distinct vowel quality and prosody from Muntenian Romanian (Bucharest). A deaf student calibrated to one regional accent finds a professor from the other region consistently difficult to track. Moldova adds a third distinct variety with its own vowel and consonant shifts.

Morphological compression

  • Romanian's case system produces long inflected forms that compress at lecture speed
  • Romanian retains a case system from Latin, producing long word forms with case suffixes, definite article suffixes, and verb agreement. In a fast academic lecture, these morphologically dense words are delivered with reduction, producing a stream of compressed lip shapes from which each word boundary must be separately decoded.

Palatal consonants

  • Palatal affricates and fricatives produce similar lip positions for different sounds
  • Romanian palatal affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ (written as 'c' and 'g' before 'e/i') and palatal fricatives both involve tongue body raising with minimal lip change. In fast academic delivery, these palatal consonants in clusters are difficult to distinguish visually from the front.

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The Challenge

Romania has the highest poverty rate for disabled people in the EU — and hearing loss is counted in the thousands, not millions

Romania officially registers 21,879 persons with hearing disability — a figure that almost certainly understates the true prevalence. Research on congenital sensorineural hearing loss in the Romanian population confirms the condition is present from birth in 1–3 per 1,000 newborns, rising to 1 in 500 in some studies. The low official count reflects a registration system rather than a national screening programme; many Romanians with hearing loss, particularly in rural areas, are never formally diagnosed or counted.

Among all people with disabilities in Romania, 38.2% are at risk of poverty or social exclusion — the third-largest gap in the EU between disabled and non-disabled poverty rates. Only 17% of working-age Romanians with disabilities are in paid employment, the lowest share in the European Union. Romania ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2011, but enforcement remains limited. Romanian Sign Language lacks the systematic legal recognition accorded to sign languages in most of Western Europe, and interpreter provision at Romanian universities is not standardised.

The academic route out of poverty is available in principle but systematically inaccessible in practice. Romanian universities have no legal obligation to provide live captioning, and deaf students must individually negotiate accommodation at each institution. Students at the University of Bucharest, Babeș-Bolyai Cluj, or the University of Iași who are deaf or hard of hearing face spoken-only instruction with no standard alternative. Captio AI captions Romanian lecture speech in real time — in an amphitheatre in Bucharest or a seminar in Cluj — making every lecture accessible on the day it happens.

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Privacy

What you hear stays with you.

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.

100% PRIVATE

Private by default

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Reviews

People love Captio AI

"The ă and â vowels look the same on the lips. In a fast lecture I was reading mouths and still missing half the words. Captio AI captures the audio and I read real captions. My notes finally make sense."

Ioana C. 🇷🇴
ioana.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Bucharest

"My professor is from Bucharest. The Muntenian accent is different from Transylvanian speech I grew up with. Captio AI handles both. Regional accent is not a barrier anymore."

Bogdan M. 🇷🇴
bogdan.m***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj

"No captioning service at the university. I was at the front row trying to lip-read fast Romanian. Captio AI runs on my phone and captions every word in real time."

Raluca P. 🇷🇴
raluca.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Iași

"Technical Romanian lectures mix Romanian with English terminology constantly. Captio AI captions both without me switching anything. Engineering lectures are accessible now."

Andrei T. 🇷🇴
andrei.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Politehnica University Bucharest

"The ă and â vowels look the same on the lips. In a fast lecture I was reading mouths and still missing half the words. Captio AI captures the audio and I read real captions. My notes finally make sense."

Ioana C. 🇷🇴
ioana.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Bucharest

"My professor is from Bucharest. The Muntenian accent is different from Transylvanian speech I grew up with. Captio AI handles both. Regional accent is not a barrier anymore."

Bogdan M. 🇷🇴
bogdan.m***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj

"No captioning service at the university. I was at the front row trying to lip-read fast Romanian. Captio AI runs on my phone and captions every word in real time."

Raluca P. 🇷🇴
raluca.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Iași

"Technical Romanian lectures mix Romanian with English terminology constantly. Captio AI captions both without me switching anything. Engineering lectures are accessible now."

Andrei T. 🇷🇴
andrei.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Politehnica University Bucharest

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Romanian.

Captio AI is free to start

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