Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Albanian live captions and productivity tool for phone & video calls

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.

👨‍👩‍👧Calls with family and friends

A call home to family in Tirana, Durrës, or Shkodër — staying connected with parents and siblings across a weekly update in Albanian.

💼Work calls and conference calls

A work call with a contact in Albania, Kosovo, or North Macedonia — professional Albanian with sector-specific vocabulary and regional accent variation.

🏥Medical and healthcare calls

A callback from a clinic or pharmacist in Albania — medical calls where catching every instruction about medication or follow-up is critical.

🏦Banks, utilities, and customer service

A call from the utility company, the bank, or a government service line in Albania — fast agents in standard Albanian following a script.

🌍International calls

A call from Albanian diaspora family in Italy or Germany, mixing Albanian with Italian or German mid-conversation.

📹Video calls — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom

A WhatsApp video call with family or friends in Albania — the primary channel for Albanian diaspora families keeping contact across Europe.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Albanian
92.3%

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 calls you have been avoiding

Captions as they speak

Words appear on screen word by word while the other person is still talking. You read what they say at the same pace everyone else hears it — no delay, no reconstruction.

Works on any call app

Captio AI does not need to integrate with any platform. Put the call on speaker, point the microphone toward the audio, and read the captions. It works the same way for any app on any device.

No more asking for repeats

Every word is on screen as it is said. If you missed something, glance at the caption rather than interrupting the call — the full sentence is there.

Handles call audio accurately

Compressed phone audio is less clean than in-person speech. Captio AI is built for real-world audio conditions, including the reduced quality of standard phone and VoIP calls.

Any language

For calls with family abroad, international colleagues, or foreign-language customer service. Live Translator captions and translates in real time with no manual setup.

Record and review after

Record any call and upload it to Audio Transcription. Get a full written record of everything said — useful for medical instructions, work decisions, and anything worth having in writing.

Albanian

Why Albanian is hard to understand

Gheg–Tosk divide

  • Albania's two dialect groups sound like different languages on the phone
  • Gheg (northern Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia) and Tosk (southern Albania, Standard Albanian) differ so substantially in phonology, vocabulary, and prosody that linguists once classified them separately. A phone call from Shkodër reads differently from one from Gjirokastër.

Rhotacism

  • Tosk replaces /n/ with /r/ mid-word — invisibly
  • Standard Albanian and Tosk change intervocalic /n/ to /r/ (rhotacism), a sound shift completely invisible on the lips. What looks like an 'n' lip shape in one dialect reads as an 'r' sound in the other — a systematic ambiguity that accumulates across a long call.

Nasal vowels in Gheg

  • Northern Gheg nasalises vowels with no visible lip change
  • Gheg Albanian has phonemic nasal vowels absent from Tosk and Standard Albanian. Nasality is produced at the soft palate and nasal passage — entirely hidden from a lip-reader. A Gheg speaker nasalising vowels looks identical to a Tosk speaker on video.

Apico-dental distinction

  • Tongue-position contrasts that share the same lip shape
  • Albanian distinguishes laminal dental consonants from apical alveolar ones (ll vs l, for instance). The difference is made with the tip vs blade of the tongue, hidden inside the mouth. Both produce the same lip shape, making the contrast invisible to a lip-reader.

Diaspora code-switching

  • Italian, German, or English appears mid-sentence without warning
  • Large Albanian communities in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK routinely mix their host language into Albanian calls. A caller may speak Albanian for two sentences, switch to Italian for a phrase, and return to Albanian — with no pause or signal marking the switch.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Hearing loss and limited access in Albania

Albania's population of 2.8 million is small, but the burden of hearing loss is proportionate to any European nation. Applying the Global Burden of Disease 2019 prevalence rates for the Eastern European region gives an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 Albanians with some degree of hearing loss, of whom roughly 130,000 live with disabling hearing loss. Albania ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2012, but implementation has lagged: audiological services are concentrated in Tirana and are largely unavailable in rural areas.

Albanian Sign Language (Gjuha e Shenjave e Shurdhëve, GJKSH) has limited legal standing and interpreter availability is critically low outside the capital. The WHO World Report on Hearing (2021) highlighted Albania among the lower-middle-income European states where hearing aid penetration remains well below population need — with many citizens unable to afford devices not covered by the public health system. Deaf and hard of hearing Albanians in rural regions and in the diaspora face the sharpest access gaps.

Captio AI captions every Albanian phone call in real time — Gheg or Tosk, from Tirana or a diaspora community in Milan — so deaf and hard of hearing users can follow conversations without relying on a hearing family member to interpret.

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

"My mother speaks Gheg from Shkodër and I grew up with Tosk. Phone calls were already hard before my hearing loss. Captio AI gets both dialects and I follow the whole call now."

Arta K. 🇦🇱
arta.k***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, 38, Tirana

"Work calls from Kosovo to Albania mix Albanian with English constantly. Captio AI keeps up with both and I can contribute to the meeting instead of guessing what was said."

Besnik M. 🇽🇰
besnik.m***@gmail.com
Severe bilateral hearing loss, 44, Pristina

"I call my sister in Gjirokastër every week on WhatsApp. She speaks fast southern Albanian. Captio AI gives me every word in real time and I stopped pretending I'd heard her."

Elira H. 🇦🇱
elira.h***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, 51, diaspora in Florence

"The bank calls me for every verification. Before Captio AI I couldn't handle those calls alone. Now I read the agent's words as they're speaking and manage my account completely independently."

Artan B. 🇦🇱
artan.b***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since birth, 31, Durrës

"My mother speaks Gheg from Shkodër and I grew up with Tosk. Phone calls were already hard before my hearing loss. Captio AI gets both dialects and I follow the whole call now."

Arta K. 🇦🇱
arta.k***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, 38, Tirana

"Work calls from Kosovo to Albania mix Albanian with English constantly. Captio AI keeps up with both and I can contribute to the meeting instead of guessing what was said."

Besnik M. 🇽🇰
besnik.m***@gmail.com
Severe bilateral hearing loss, 44, Pristina

"I call my sister in Gjirokastër every week on WhatsApp. She speaks fast southern Albanian. Captio AI gives me every word in real time and I stopped pretending I'd heard her."

Elira H. 🇦🇱
elira.h***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, 51, diaspora in Florence

"The bank calls me for every verification. Before Captio AI I couldn't handle those calls alone. Now I read the agent's words as they're speaking and manage my account completely independently."

Artan B. 🇦🇱
artan.b***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since birth, 31, Durrës

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every call in Albanian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store