Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Serbian 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

Large lecture halls at the University of Belgrade, University of Novi Sad, and University of Niš — Serbian instruction at full academic pace. Captio AI captions the professor in real time.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and вежбе (tutorial sessions) where discussion is in Serbian, often with English scientific vocabulary. Captio AI handles both without manual switching.

💻Online and recorded lectures

Recorded lectures on university e-learning portals or shared as video files — play on speaker and Captio AI captions whatever is playing in real time.

📚Study groups

Study group sessions in Serbian student dormitories reviewing lecture content. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

Lectures from Bosnian or Montenegrin faculty whose Serbian carries Ijekavian phonological features. Captio AI handles Ekavian and Ijekavian Serbian varieties.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

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

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Serbian
91.9%

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.

Serbian

Why Serbian is hard to understand

Pitch accent system

  • Serbian has four phonemic tonal accents — all invisible on the lips
  • Serbian uses four pitch accents to distinguish words: short rising, short falling, long rising, and long falling. The same sequence of consonants and vowels carries completely different meaning depending on the tonal melody. In a Belgrade lecture hall, these tonal distinctions are entirely absent from the visual signal — a deaf student sees identical lip movements for words that differ only in pitch.

Ekavian-Ijekavian split

  • Standard Serbian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian Serbian deliver different word shapes
  • Standard Serbian is Ekavian (Belgrade standard uses 'e' for the historical yat vowel: 'mleko', milk), while Ijekavian varieties spoken in Bosnia, Montenegro, and Republika Srpska use 'ije/je' ('mlijeko'). In a university with students or faculty from across the former Yugoslav space, the same underlying word arrives with different lip shapes depending on which variety the speaker uses.

Vowel length invisibility

  • Serbian long and short vowels change meaning — the distinction is invisible
  • Serbian distinguishes long and short vowels phonemically across all five vowel qualities. 'Grad' (city) versus 'grâd' (hail) — the length distinction carries different meaning but produces the same lip shape. At lecture speed, a deaf student tracking Serbian lip movements loses this phonemic dimension throughout.

Cluster reduction at speed

  • Fast Serbian academic speech reduces consonant clusters — word shapes compress
  • Serbian casual and fast academic speech reduces clusters and word boundaries. The careful enunciation a deaf student might use to prepare from written materials does not match the rapid, reduced delivery of a university lecture. Word boundaries blur and initial consonants weaken.

Vojvodinian contact varieties

  • Universities in Novi Sad serve Hungarian-Serbian bilinguals — lip patterns shift
  • Vojvodina has a significant Hungarian-speaking population, and the University of Novi Sad draws many L2 Serbian speakers whose phonology carries Hungarian influence. Hungarian-influenced Serbian has different vowel quality and rhythm. A deaf student calibrated to Belgrade Serbian finds Novi Sad L2 Serbian speech consistently different to track.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss affects 68% of older Serbs — in a country where sign language lacks full statutory recognition

Research on sensory deprivation in the elderly population of Serbia found that hearing loss affects 68% of those aged 70 and over — a figure consistent with global ageing trends but representing a significant unmet need in a country with limited systematic audiological provision. The Deaf Union of Serbia (Savez gluvih i nagluvih Srbije) has operated since the late 1940s to support employment and social integration of deaf and hard of hearing Serbs, and Serbia has enacted anti-discrimination law including the Act on Prevention of Discrimination against Persons with Disabilities.

Serbian Sign Language has not received full statutory legal recognition equivalent to that provided by countries like Norway or Sweden. The gap between policy commitment and institutional implementation is felt most acutely in higher education: Serbian universities do not provide systematic live captioning, and deaf students at the University of Belgrade or Novi Sad must individually request accommodation from the disability office, with interpreter availability limited and specialist academic interpreters essentially unavailable. Serbia ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which creates a framework — but not a delivery mechanism.

The linguistically complex Serbian academic environment — Ekavian in Belgrade, Ijekavian varieties in universities drawing Bosnian and Montenegrin students, and Hungarian-Serbian bilingual contexts in Vojvodina — means that a deaf student who successfully lip-reads Belgrade Serbian still faces a significant challenge with every faculty member from outside that variety. Captio AI captions Serbian lecture speech in real time, handling Ekavian and Ijekavian varieties in the same session, so any Serbian university lecture is accessible from any seat.

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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

"Serbian pitch accents are invisible on the lips. Four different tonal patterns for the same consonant-vowel sequence. Captio AI gets them all right. Belgrade lectures are accessible now."

Tijana M. 🇷🇸
tijana.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Belgrade

"My professor speaks Ijekavian — Bosnian standard. The word shapes are different from Belgrade Serbian I grew up reading lips for. Captio AI handles both. No more guessing between varieties."

Bojan R. 🇷🇸
bojan.r***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, University of Novi Sad

"No interpreter at Niš for my faculty. I was at the front row trying to lip-read fast Serbian. Captio AI runs on my phone and captions every word."

Jelena K. 🇷🇸
jelena.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Niš

"Serbian lectures drop consonants and reduce vowels at speed. Captio AI processes the audio and I read the transcript. Kragujevac seminars are accessible now."

Aleksandar V. 🇷🇸
aleksandar.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Kragujevac

"Serbian pitch accents are invisible on the lips. Four different tonal patterns for the same consonant-vowel sequence. Captio AI gets them all right. Belgrade lectures are accessible now."

Tijana M. 🇷🇸
tijana.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Belgrade

"My professor speaks Ijekavian — Bosnian standard. The word shapes are different from Belgrade Serbian I grew up reading lips for. Captio AI handles both. No more guessing between varieties."

Bojan R. 🇷🇸
bojan.r***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, University of Novi Sad

"No interpreter at Niš for my faculty. I was at the front row trying to lip-read fast Serbian. Captio AI runs on my phone and captions every word."

Jelena K. 🇷🇸
jelena.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Niš

"Serbian lectures drop consonants and reduce vowels at speed. Captio AI processes the audio and I read the transcript. Kragujevac seminars are accessible now."

Aleksandar V. 🇷🇸
aleksandar.v***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Kragujevac

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Serbian.

Captio AI is free to start

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