Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Romanian live captions and productivity tool for meetings

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

🔄Stand-ups and team syncs

Daily ședințe de echipă and stand-ups in Romanian offices where updates come quickly in Romanian. Captio AI captions each speaker so you follow every item.

📹Video calls

Teams or Zoom calls with colleagues across Romania or internationally. Put the call on speaker and read captions in real time.

🎯One-on-ones and reviews

Evaluări de performanță and one-on-one sessions with a șef. Important conversations where every word matters. Captio AI transcribes everything.

🎤All-hands and town halls

Company-wide adunări generale where management addresses all staff. Captio AI captions every word from any seat.

🌍International and multilingual meetings

Meetings that mix Romanian and English — common in Bucharest's IT and corporate sector. Live Translator follows any switch in real time.

Informal catch-ups

Pauza de cafea conversations, desk-side questions, corridor catch-ups. The informal moments in Romanian offices where working relationships are built. Captio AI covers those too.

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

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Captio AI in everyday use
Why Captio AI

Built for the speed of a real meeting

Captions while they are still speaking

Words appear on screen as each person talks — not after they finish. You read what someone is saying at the same moment everyone else hears it.

Works in any meeting format

Conference rooms, open-plan offices, video calls, all-hands. Place the phone on the table or hold it — Captio AI handles the rest.

Handles fast speech and crosstalk

Captio AI is designed for real meetings, not controlled dictation. It follows whoever is speaking loudest at any moment, keeping up with the natural pace of discussion.

No setup, no explaining

Open the app and place the phone. No pairing, no telling colleagues what you are doing, no requesting anything from the meeting organiser.

Review everything after

Record the meeting and upload it to Audio Transcription for a full written record. Use AI Summary to extract decisions and action items so nothing from the meeting gets lost.

60+ languages

For international teams, multilingual meetings, or colleagues who switch between languages mid-discussion. No setup required — Captio AI detects and captions in real time.

Romanian

Why Romanian is hard to understand

Central vowels /ə/ /ɨ/

  • Romanian's two central vowels — schwa and the distinctive /ɨ/ — produce near-identical lip positions but carry different meaning
  • Romanian is unique among Romance languages in having both a mid-central /ə/ (schwa) and a high-central /ɨ/ ('â'/'î') as phonemic contrasts. Both vowels are articulated with slightly open, neutral lips — making them indistinguishable on the lips in a meeting. Yet they distinguish words: 'în' vs 'an', 'vânt' vs 'vant'. A hard of hearing person lip-reading a Romanian colleague cannot separate these two central vowels at meeting pace.

Final consonant clusters

  • Romanian word-final consonant clusters compress into a single frame at speech speed, removing word boundaries from view
  • Romanian allows complex final clusters ('munți', 'câmpuri', 'hopuri') whose multiple consonants compress at natural speech pace. In a meeting these trailing consonants merge into the next word — a phenomenon that removes word boundaries from the visual stream entirely, making sentence segmentation from lip-reading very difficult.

Transylvanian vs standard

  • Transylvanian Romanian has prosodic and vowel-quality differences from Bucharest standard that a lip-reader trained on standard will not recognise
  • The Transylvanian dialect retains prosodic features shared with Hungarian and German from centuries of multilingual coexistence. Its vowel duration patterns, stress placement, and pitch contour differ from Bucharest standard — creating a recognition gap for a deaf person who has learned to lip-read standard Romanian and now sits in a meeting with a colleague from Cluj-Napoca.

Non-syllabic final -i

  • The final non-syllabic -i leaves the lips spread after the word ends — a systematic visual mismatch that misleads lip-reading
  • Romanian words ending in a non-syllabic /i/ (palatalizing the preceding consonant) end with lips spread as if saying [i] even though no vowel sound is heard. A deaf lip-reader interprets this spread as a word boundary or an additional vowel — a systematic visual ambiguity that produces consistent misreadings across a Romanian meeting.

Romanian–English code-switching

  • Bucharest corporate speech integrates English terms into Romanian sentences, shifting the phonological system mid-sentence
  • Romanian corporate culture increasingly integrates English management, IT vocabulary, and finance language into Romanian sentences. In a Bucharest tech or finance meeting, a sentence may switch from Romanian phonology to English phonology mid-sentence without transition — a sudden mismatch between expected Romanian mouth shapes and the English articulation being used.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Hearing loss and workplace exclusion in Romania

Romania's deaf population is estimated at 20,000 to 30,000 people according to the European Union of the Deaf, in a country of approximately 19 million. Romanian Sign Language (RSL) received strengthened legal recognition in 2020 under Law 27/2020, guaranteeing deaf citizens the right to use RSL to access public services, education, health, and employment. Yet recognition on paper and lived access diverge substantially: interpreter availability remains insufficient for daily professional needs, with interpreter provision concentrated in Bucharest and leaving deaf professionals in Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, and Iași without adequate support for formal meetings.

A 2024 cross-sectional study published in PMC examined psychosocial outcomes of hearing aid use among Romanian adults with sensorineural hearing loss, finding significant gaps in rehabilitation uptake and social participation across age groups. Romania's disability compensation system provides monthly indemnities rising from 350 RON to 368 RON for top-tier disability — approximately €70 per month — among the lowest in the European Union. This financial constraint creates a direct barrier to accessibility technology and interpreter services for many working-age deaf and hard of hearing Romanians navigating professional environments.

Romania's technology and outsourcing sectors — concentrated in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, and Iași — employ large numbers of professionals in meeting-heavy roles, but corporate accessibility standards remain unevenly implemented. The Transylvanian dialect gap adds a layer of complexity not addressed by standard tools: a deaf professional in Bucharest who joins a meeting with colleagues from Cluj encounters a phonological and prosodic variety that looks different on the lips from the standard they have learned.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

Download on theApp Store
Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Bucharest tech meetings switch from Romanian to English mid-sentence and the lip shapes change completely without warning. Captio AI handles both languages in the same session. I follow every sprint planning point without needing to ask for a repeat."

Andrei M. 🇷🇴
andrei.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Bucharest

"Cluj Romanian sounds different from Bucharest and no previous tool handled the Transylvanian accent. Captio AI gives me the full transcript in real time. Team meetings in Cluj are accessible for the first time."

Ioana P. 🇷🇴
ioana.p***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, BPO company, Cluj-Napoca

"Finance meetings in Bucharest use formal Romanian mixed with English terms that shift lip-reading cues mid-sentence. Captio AI captures both accurately. I know the full content of every decision without guessing."

Bogdan T. 🇷🇴
bogdan.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, finance company, Bucharest

"Timișoara has its own Banat regional accent influenced by Hungarian and German — very different from Bucharest. Captio AI handles the regional variety. The production briefing is accessible and I follow every instruction correctly."

Cristina N. 🇷🇴
cristina.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, manufacturing, Timișoara

"Bucharest tech meetings switch from Romanian to English mid-sentence and the lip shapes change completely without warning. Captio AI handles both languages in the same session. I follow every sprint planning point without needing to ask for a repeat."

Andrei M. 🇷🇴
andrei.m***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, IT company, Bucharest

"Cluj Romanian sounds different from Bucharest and no previous tool handled the Transylvanian accent. Captio AI gives me the full transcript in real time. Team meetings in Cluj are accessible for the first time."

Ioana P. 🇷🇴
ioana.p***@gmail.com
Deaf since childhood, BPO company, Cluj-Napoca

"Finance meetings in Bucharest use formal Romanian mixed with English terms that shift lip-reading cues mid-sentence. Captio AI captures both accurately. I know the full content of every decision without guessing."

Bogdan T. 🇷🇴
bogdan.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, finance company, Bucharest

"Timișoara has its own Banat regional accent influenced by Hungarian and German — very different from Bucharest. Captio AI handles the regional variety. The production briefing is accessible and I follow every instruction correctly."

Cristina N. 🇷🇴
cristina.n***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, manufacturing, Timișoara

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every word in Romanian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store