Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Macedonian 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 Skopje, Bitola, or Ohrid — catching up with relatives who speak their regional dialect of Macedonian.

💼Work calls and conference calls

A work call with Macedonian colleagues or clients — professional Macedonian with its standard register and sector-specific vocabulary.

🏥Medical and healthcare calls

A callback from a zdravstvena ustanova (health centre) in Skopje or a apteka (pharmacy) — healthcare calls where catching every word about treatment or results matters.

🏦Banks, utilities, and customer service

A call from a Macedonian bank, EVN utilities, or a government service line — automated Macedonian followed by an agent at full conversational speed.

🌍International calls

A call from Macedonian diaspora in Germany, Switzerland, or Australia, mixing Macedonian with German or English mid-sentence.

📹Video calls — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom

A Viber or WhatsApp video call with family in Macedonia — the platforms of choice for the large Macedonian diaspora staying connected with Skopje.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Macedonian
87.6%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

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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.

Macedonian

Why Macedonian is hard to understand

Fixed antepenultimate stress

  • Predictable stress position reduces unstressed syllable visibility
  • Macedonian stress falls predictably on the third syllable from the end — a feature unique among South Slavic languages. This means the first one or two syllables of a longer word are unstressed and reduced, making word onsets harder to lip-read. A lip-reader sees reduced initial syllables where they expect the clearest shapes.

Schwa vowel

  • The unstressed schwa has a neutral, unreadable lip position
  • Macedonian has a schwa-like vowel /ə/ in unstressed syllables — a mid-central vowel with a neutral, nearly closed mouth position. It provides no distinctive lip shape and can stand in for reduced vowels across a wide range of unstressed contexts.

Palatalized consonants

  • Soft consonant variants differ in tongue position only
  • Like other South Slavic languages, Macedonian has palatalized consonant variants where softening is made by raising the tongue toward the palate. Lip shapes are identical for plain and palatalized versions of the same consonant, making the distinction invisible to a lip-reader.

Three dialect groups

  • Northern, Western, and Southeastern Macedonian read differently
  • Macedonian divides into three main dialect groups — Northern (Skopje area), Western (Ohrid, Bitola), and Southeastern (Strumica, Štip) — with distinct vowel qualities and prosody. A phone call from the capital sounds different from one from the western highlands.

Albanian code-switching

  • Albanian appears in calls from mixed western communities
  • In areas with significant Albanian-speaking populations — Tetovo, Gostivar, parts of Skopje — Macedonian-Albanian code-switching is common on phone calls. The two languages are entirely unrelated, and the phonological shift when a speaker moves from Macedonian to Albanian is drastic and unpredictable.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in North Macedonia: limited infrastructure and recognition gaps

North Macedonia has a population of 2.1 million. Applying the Global Burden of Disease 2019 prevalence rates for the European region gives an estimated 420,000 Macedonians with some degree of hearing loss. The country ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2011, but the Macedonian Sign Language community operates without full legal recognition in national law, and interpreter provision outside Skopje is limited.

North Macedonia is an EU candidate country, and as part of its accession process has committed to aligning disability policy with EU standards — including the European Disability Strategy framework that covers accessible communication. In practice, phone and video call services in Macedonian — from banking to healthcare to utilities — provide no real-time captioning, and deaf and hard of hearing Macedonians relying on lip-reading or residual hearing on phone calls face systematic access barriers. The Macedonian Association of the Deaf exists but has limited resources to advocate for systemic change.

Captio AI captions every Macedonian phone call in real time — from a family call from the western highlands to a bank callback in Skopje Macedonian — so deaf and hard of hearing users can follow every word independently.

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

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Reviews

People love Captio AI

"The health centre calls back quickly but the nurse speaks fast in Northern Macedonian. Captio AI gives me every word in real time and I manage my own appointments without needing anyone to interpret."

Marija T. 🇲🇰
marija.t***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, 43, Skopje

"Western Macedonian dialect from Bitola reads completely differently from Skopje Macedonian. Captio AI handles both and I follow work calls from colleagues in both cities."

Aleksandar B. 🇲🇰
aleksandar.b***@gmail.com
Severe bilateral hearing loss, 50, Bitola

"I call home to Ohrid on Viber every weekend. My parents speak fast western Macedonian. Captio AI captions every word and I'm part of the conversation instead of smiling and nodding."

Elena R. 🇲🇰
elena.r***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, 36, diaspora in Düsseldorf

"The bank called me about my card and the automated Macedonian ran together. Captio AI gave me the full transcript as it played and I sorted the issue completely on my own."

Nikola G. 🇲🇰
nikola.g***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since birth, 29, Štip

"The health centre calls back quickly but the nurse speaks fast in Northern Macedonian. Captio AI gives me every word in real time and I manage my own appointments without needing anyone to interpret."

Marija T. 🇲🇰
marija.t***@gmail.com
Moderate hearing loss, 43, Skopje

"Western Macedonian dialect from Bitola reads completely differently from Skopje Macedonian. Captio AI handles both and I follow work calls from colleagues in both cities."

Aleksandar B. 🇲🇰
aleksandar.b***@gmail.com
Severe bilateral hearing loss, 50, Bitola

"I call home to Ohrid on Viber every weekend. My parents speak fast western Macedonian. Captio AI captions every word and I'm part of the conversation instead of smiling and nodding."

Elena R. 🇲🇰
elena.r***@gmail.com
Progressive hearing loss, 36, diaspora in Düsseldorf

"The bank called me about my card and the automated Macedonian ran together. Captio AI gave me the full transcript as it played and I sorted the issue completely on my own."

Nikola G. 🇲🇰
nikola.g***@gmail.com
Profound hearing loss since birth, 29, Štip

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every call in Macedonian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store