Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Slovenian 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 Ljubljana and University of Maribor — where lectures are delivered in Slovenian by lecturers from across the country's 46-dialect landscape, each bringing distinct regional phonological patterns.

🔬Seminars and tutorials

Seminars and discussion sessions at Slovenian universities — small group formats where students and faculty debate in Slovenian, mixing the formal written register with regional colloquial varieties.

💻Online and recorded lectures

Online and recorded lectures on Slovenian university platforms — digital content where the spoken register of colloquial Slovenian diverges from the written standard, and vowel reductions are the only acoustic channel.

📚Study groups

Study groups in Ljubljana, Maribor, and Koper student districts — peer study in Slovenian, with students from Primorska, Koroška, and Štajerska bringing dialect-influenced speech into shared accommodation.

🌍Foreign-language and international courses

International courses at Slovenian universities — EU-funded or Erasmus programmes delivered in Slovenian or English-Slovenian bilingual format, with visiting scholars using non-standard Slovenian pronunciation.

🎤Guest speakers and public talks

Guest speakers at Slovenian academic institutions — researchers and public figures giving lectures at the University of Ljubljana or on RTV Slovenija, often with SL interpretation but without real-time captioning.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Slovenian
93.2%

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.

Slovenian

Why Slovenian is hard to understand

46 dialects

  • Slovenian has 46 dialects and no single dominant spoken standard
  • Slovenian is divided into seven major dialect groups containing approximately 46 dialects. Unlike most European languages with one prestige spoken norm, Slovenian has no dominant colloquial standard — each region's educated speakers use their own variety in informal settings. A deaf student at the University of Ljubljana encounters lecturers from Koroška, Primorska, or Štajerska whose phonology diverges substantially from what they have practiced lip-reading, creating a new visual mapping problem with each unfamiliar lecturer.

Pitch accent

  • Central Slovenian dialects preserve a two-tone pitch accent system invisible on the lips
  • Many Slovenian dialects in a north–south band across the center of the country maintain a pitch accent system with two tonal contours — acute (rising) and circumflex (falling) — on stressed syllables containing long vowels. The distinction is entirely acoustic. A deaf student lip-reading a lecturer from a central Slovenian variety sees identical lip shapes for phonologically distinct words, with no visual articulatory difference between the two tones.

Vowel reduction

  • Colloquial Slovenian reduces and elides syllables that appear fully in written form
  • Standard written Slovenian preserves vowels that are reduced or dropped in connected colloquial speech. In rapid academic speech, unstressed vowels reduce to schwa or disappear entirely — producing a spoken word that looks shorter and phonetically different from its written form. A deaf student trained on written Slovenian encounters a spoken lecture that partially matches their schema but drops key syllables at speed.

German and Italian contact

  • Border-region Slovenian lectures contain German and Italian loanwords with foreign phonology
  • Western Slovenian (Primorska) has centuries of contact with Italian, and northern Slovenian (Koroška, Štajerska) with Austrian German. Lecturers from these regions use German or Italian loanwords with their original phonology — including German front rounded vowels /ø, y/ and Italian geminate consonants — that do not appear in standard Slovenian and create unexpected visual shapes on the lips.

Dual number morphology

  • Slovenian uniquely preserves grammatical dual — word forms absent in all neighboring Slavic languages
  • Slovenian is one of very few living languages with a fully productive grammatical dual — a distinct inflectional category for exactly two of something. Nouns, adjectives, verbs, and pronouns all have dual forms that differ from singular and plural. A deaf student who has experience lip-reading Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian is not calibrated to these Slovenian dual endings and will misread the lip shapes.

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The Challenge

Slovenia's deaf and hard of hearing community: systematic legal recognition — and COVID-19 revealed the lip-reading dependency that captioning can replace

The Hearing Clubs Association of Slovenia (ZDGNS) was registered as a representative disability organisation in 2004. It unites 13 inter-communal member clubs and advocates for the equal status and rights of deaf and hard of hearing people in Slovenia. The Slovenian Government has a long-standing cooperation with ZDGNS — including regular government press conferences delivered with a Slovenian Sign Language (SSL) interpreter. Slovenian Sign Language has been recognised by law and supports an active cultural community.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the extent to which Slovenia's deaf community depends on lip-reading for daily communication. When mandatory mask use was introduced in public spaces — including university lecture halls — the visual channel on which deaf and hard of hearing students rely was eliminated entirely. The European Union of the Deaf reported on Slovenia's response and the community's acute vulnerability. The experience has sharpened advocacy for automatic captioning as a baseline provision, rather than a supplement to lip-reading.

Slovenia's situation illustrates a pattern common to smaller Central European countries: strong legal recognition of sign language rights combined with insufficient supply of academic interpreters for university-level specialist content. For a deaf student at the University of Ljubljana following a lecture in Slovenian — which may be delivered in one of 46 dialect varieties, with dual morphology and pitch accent features invisible from lip position — Captio AI provides real-time captions that work regardless of which Slovenian variety the lecturer speaks.

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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

"My lecturer is from Primorska — Italian-influenced phonology, different vowels entirely. I couldn't build a lip-reading map for it. Captio AI handles every Slovenian variety. Ljubljana lectures are accessible."

Ana K. 🇸🇮
ana.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, University of Ljubljana

"Slovenian dual forms — I kept misreading the plural endings because I wasn't calibrated to dual. Captio AI shows the full word on screen. Maribor seminars are the first I've fully followed."

Matej P. 🇸🇮
matej.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Maribor

"Masks in the lecture hall meant complete communication blackout for two years. Captio AI was the only way I followed any lecture. Now I use it all the time."

Tanja B. 🇸🇮
tanja.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Ljubljana, COVID period

"Pitch accent in central Slovenian dialects — rising vs. falling tone — completely invisible. Captio AI resolves it acoustically. Seminars at Primorska university are clear now."

Rok H. 🇸🇮
rok.h***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Koper, Primorska

"My lecturer is from Primorska — Italian-influenced phonology, different vowels entirely. I couldn't build a lip-reading map for it. Captio AI handles every Slovenian variety. Ljubljana lectures are accessible."

Ana K. 🇸🇮
ana.k***@gmail.com
Deaf since birth, University of Ljubljana

"Slovenian dual forms — I kept misreading the plural endings because I wasn't calibrated to dual. Captio AI shows the full word on screen. Maribor seminars are the first I've fully followed."

Matej P. 🇸🇮
matej.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, University of Maribor

"Masks in the lecture hall meant complete communication blackout for two years. Captio AI was the only way I followed any lecture. Now I use it all the time."

Tanja B. 🇸🇮
tanja.b***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Ljubljana, COVID period

"Pitch accent in central Slovenian dialects — rising vs. falling tone — completely invisible. Captio AI resolves it acoustically. Seminars at Primorska university are clear now."

Rok H. 🇸🇮
rok.h***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, Koper, Primorska

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every lecture in Slovenian.

Captio AI is free to start

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