Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Bulgarian 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 with parents in Plovdiv or family in a village in the Rhodopes — who speak fast and assume you follow every word. Captio AI captions in real time so you keep up with the conversation without asking them to repeat.

💼Work calls and conference calls

A work call with Sofia colleagues or a client video call in formal Bulgarian. Put the call on speaker, point Captio AI toward the audio, and follow every agenda item without losing the thread to fast speech or consonant compression.

🏥Medical and healthcare calls

A callback from your личен лекар (GP) or a hospital in Sofia — formal medical Bulgarian spoken quickly with clinical vocabulary. Captio AI captions every instruction and appointment detail in real time so nothing is missed.

🏦Banks, utilities, and customer service

A call from UniCredit Bulbank, DSK Bank, or a utility provider — automated Bulgarian menus and fast-speaking agents. Captio AI captions whatever comes through the speaker so you have the information on screen.

🌍International calls

A call from Bulgarian diaspora family in Germany, Spain, or the UK — often mixing Bulgarian with the local language naturally. Live Translator handles any code-switching so distance is not an additional barrier.

📹Video calls — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom

A Viber or WhatsApp video call — the dominant channels for Bulgarian families across the country and diaspora. Captio AI listens through the speaker and captions in real time alongside the video feed.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Bulgarian
94.4%

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.

Bulgarian

Why Bulgarian is hard to understand

Hard/soft consonant pairs

  • Palatalized consonants are invisible on the lips
  • Bulgarian consonants come in hard (unpalatalized) and soft (palatalized) pairs, and this distinction changes both meaning and grammar. Palatalization is produced by raising the tongue body toward the hard palate — a movement entirely invisible on the lips and acoustically subtle on compressed call audio. For a hard of hearing caller, distinguishing 'лет' from 'лет'' (palatalized) or other hard/soft pairs requires hearing what the lips cannot show.

Schwa vowel

  • The Bulgarian ъ has almost no visible lip position
  • Bulgarian ъ /ɤ/ — a mid-back unrounded vowel sometimes called the 'yat' — is one of the most frequent vowels in Bulgarian and appears in the most common words including 'ъгъл' (corner), 'бъда' (to be), 'гъба' (mushroom). This vowel is produced with neutral, slightly spread lips that look identical to a resting mouth position. For a hard of hearing person, the most common vowel in Bulgarian is the one that leaves the least information on the face.

Eastern-Western dialect gradient

  • Sofia and Plovdiv Bulgarian sound different from Vidin and the far west
  • Bulgarian dialects form a gradient from conservative Eastern varieties (which preserve older vowel distinctions) to innovative Western varieties (which have compressed or merged those distinctions). A caller from Sofia or Plovdiv in the east sounds different from one from Vidin or Kyustendil in the far west. The vowel inventory, prosodic patterns, and some consonant realizations shift across this east-west spectrum.

Final devoicing

  • Word-final consonants swap identity just as in Russian and Czech
  • Like other Slavic languages, Bulgarian devoices obstruents at the end of words: /b/ becomes /p/, /d/ becomes /t/, /g/ becomes /k/, /v/ becomes /f/ at word boundaries. For a hard of hearing caller, the visual or acoustic cue at the end of a word indicates the wrong underlying phoneme — voiced-voiceless pairs that are spelled differently are pronounced identically in final position.

Turkish code-switching

  • Callers from southern and eastern Bulgaria mix Bulgarian and Turkish
  • In regions of Bulgaria with significant Turkish-speaking populations — the Rhodopes, Kardzhali, and parts of the northeast — Bulgarian callers naturally weave Turkish words and phrases into Bulgarian conversation. This is not code-switching in the formal sense but a deeply embedded regional feature. For a hard of hearing person expecting Standard Bulgarian, a call from these regions introduces unexpected phonological patterns without warning.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Bulgaria's deaf community is the country's oldest registered disability organisation — and still faces significant daily barriers

The Union of the Deaf in Bulgaria, founded in Sofia on 12 July 1934, is the oldest and largest organisation of people with disabilities in the country, with approximately 6,500 members organised in 12 regional organisations. This institutional history reflects a long-standing deaf community in Bulgaria, but not necessarily adequate support. The GBD 2019 study estimated that approximately 5 percent of the global population has disabling hearing loss — applied to Bulgaria's population of around 6.5 million, this points to roughly 325,000 people with significant hearing difficulty, a figure far above the registered membership of the primary deaf organisation.

In Bulgarian healthcare, not all children with hearing loss are treated due to capacity and funding constraints. Bulgaria has only three schools for deaf and hard of hearing students running from preschool to primary level. Beyond education, the daily infrastructure for deaf Bulgarians — sign language interpretation in medical settings, relay services for phone calls, government accessibility obligations — remains limited. Hearing-impaired people in Bulgaria report reliance on improvised family support for high-stakes communication rather than guaranteed professional accommodation.

Captio AI captions every Bulgarian phone call in real time — so whether it is a hospital callback in Sofia, a family call from Plovdiv, or a video call with Bulgarian diaspora in Germany, the words appear on screen as they are spoken.

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

"Hospital callbacks in Sofia are in fast formal Bulgarian with clinical terms I do not always know. With Captio AI I read every word in real time — specialist name, date, which building to go to. I stop asking the nurse to repeat herself."

Desislava P. 🇧🇬
desislava.p***@gmail.com
Bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, Sofia

"Plovdiv speech has its own rhythm and vowels that differ from Sofia. Captio AI handles Plovdiv Bulgarian without any problems — I follow calls from Sofia colleagues and village family calls equally well."

Georgi N. 🇧🇬
georgi.n***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Plovdiv

"I call my mother in Kardzhali and she mixes Bulgarian with Turkish phrases naturally. I grew up in Sofia and some of the Turkish words are unfamiliar. Captio AI captions everything — I follow the full call, Turkish parts and all."

Ivelina S. 🇩🇪
ivelina.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Bulgarian diaspora in Berlin

"Bank calls from DSK are automated and fast. I always pressed the wrong option because I could not follow the menu. With Captio AI I read each option as it is spoken and reach the right department first time."

Hristo M. 🇧🇬
hristo.m***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Varna

"Hospital callbacks in Sofia are in fast formal Bulgarian with clinical terms I do not always know. With Captio AI I read every word in real time — specialist name, date, which building to go to. I stop asking the nurse to repeat herself."

Desislava P. 🇧🇬
desislava.p***@gmail.com
Bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, Sofia

"Plovdiv speech has its own rhythm and vowels that differ from Sofia. Captio AI handles Plovdiv Bulgarian without any problems — I follow calls from Sofia colleagues and village family calls equally well."

Georgi N. 🇧🇬
georgi.n***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, Plovdiv

"I call my mother in Kardzhali and she mixes Bulgarian with Turkish phrases naturally. I grew up in Sofia and some of the Turkish words are unfamiliar. Captio AI captions everything — I follow the full call, Turkish parts and all."

Ivelina S. 🇩🇪
ivelina.s***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Bulgarian diaspora in Berlin

"Bank calls from DSK are automated and fast. I always pressed the wrong option because I could not follow the menu. With Captio AI I read each option as it is spoken and reach the right department first time."

Hristo M. 🇧🇬
hristo.m***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Varna

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every call in Bulgarian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store