Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Romanian 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 Iași or grandparents in a village near Cluj — who speak fast Transylvanian or Moldovan Romanian and assume you follow everything. Captio AI captions in real time so you follow the whole call without asking them to repeat.

💼Work calls and conference calls

A work call with colleagues in Bucharest or a client in a regional office, often mixing Romanian business vocabulary with English acronyms. Put the call on speaker, point Captio AI toward the audio, and follow the whole discussion without losing context.

🏥Medical and healthcare calls

A callback from a cabinet medical (private clinic) or from the CNAS (national health insurance) about a referral or reimbursement. High-stakes calls in rapid formal Romanian — Captio AI captions every instruction and appointment detail in real time.

🏦Banks, utilities, and customer service

A call from BCR, BRD, or a Romanian utility provider — automated systems in Romanian, long menus, and fast-speaking agents. Captio AI captions whatever comes through the speaker so you have the information in writing.

🌍International calls

A call from Romanian diaspora family in Italy, Spain, Germany, or the UK — often mixing Romanian with the local language mid-sentence. Live Translator handles the language transition so you follow both sides of a mixed conversation.

📹Video calls — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom

A WhatsApp or FaceTime video call — the standard for Romanian families spread across the country and diaspora. Captio AI listens through the speaker and captions in real time alongside the video.

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 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.

Romanian

Why Romanian is hard to understand

Schwa vowel

  • The ă vowel has almost no visible lip shape
  • Romanian's most frequent vowel is ă — the schwa /ə/ — a mid-central sound made with neutral, relaxed lips. On a phone call, this vowel arrives as an acoustic mid-point with no distinctive lip shape to anchor it. Since ă appears in the majority of Romanian words, a hard of hearing person loses a key identification cue throughout every sentence.

Bilabial confusion

  • P, B, F, V, and M share the same lip shape
  • Romanian bilabial and labiodental consonants (/p/, /b/, /f/, /v/, /m/) all require lip-to-lip or lip-to-teeth contact and produce nearly identical visual configurations. In fast phone conversation where these appear in sequence — 'profesoară', 'problemă', 'vorbim' — distinguishing them without clear audio is extremely difficult.

Regional dialect variation

  • Muntenian, Moldovan, and Transylvanian Romanian sound different
  • Romanian is spoken across three historically distinct regions with phonological differences: Muntenian Romanian (the Bucharest standard), Moldovan Romanian (blending into Moldovan), and Transylvanian Romanian (with Slavic and Hungarian phonological influence). A caller from Cluj sounds different from a caller from Iași, who sounds different again from Bucharest — and each variety shifts the vowel and consonant realization a hard of hearing person must parse.

Unpredictable stress

  • Stress moves freely across Romanian words
  • Romanian word stress is not fixed — it falls on different syllables in different words and shifts across inflectional forms. Unlike languages with predictable stress, Romanian requires reconstructing the full word to locate where emphasis falls. For a hard of hearing caller, the rhythmic anchor that helps parse unfamiliar words is absent.

Romanian-English code-switching

  • Urban Romanians mix English terms into everyday phone calls
  • In Bucharest and other urban centres, professional and younger callers regularly insert English technology, business, and cultural terms into Romanian conversation. A work call might shift between standard Romanian and English abbreviations or phrases mid-sentence — creating an unpredictable phonological shift a hard of hearing person must follow.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Romania's deaf community navigates daily life without a newborn screening system

Romania officially recognises 21,879 persons with hearing disability — a figure that almost certainly understates the true prevalence. Romania has no coherent national strategy for newborn sensorineural hearing loss diagnosis, and the majority of maternities do not perform hearing screening for newborns as recommended by international standards. This means children with congenital hearing loss often go undiagnosed for years, missing the critical window for early language intervention. Applied to a population of approximately 19 million, the GBD 2019 global prevalence rate of 5 percent for disabling hearing loss would suggest roughly 950,000 Romanians with significant hearing difficulty — far above registered figures.

Beyond diagnosis, access to support in Romania is fragmented. An estimated 387,000 people live with a mild form of deafblindness and over 38,000 with a severe form — populations that face particular isolation, as Romanian Sign Language interpreting services are concentrated in Bucharest and a few major cities. Without trained interpreters and suitable support, many deaf and hard of hearing Romanians are unable to access information and services independently. Medical appointments, government calls, and banking interactions — the practical infrastructure of daily life — routinely require improvised workarounds.

Captio AI captions every Romanian phone call in real time — so whether it is a callback from a doctor in Bucharest, a family call from Iași, or a government service call anywhere in Romania, 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

"CNAS callbacks are the worst — fast formal Romanian with medical vocabulary and zero patience for questions. With Captio AI I read every word in real time and finally understand what I am supposed to do next with my referral."

Ioana P. 🇷🇴
ioana.p***@gmail.com
Sensorineural hearing loss, Bucharest

"My colleagues in Bucharest speak a different Romanian from what I grew up with in Transylvania. Captio AI handles both dialects without missing a beat — I follow our weekly team call from start to finish for the first time."

Andrei M. 🇷🇴
andrei.m***@gmail.com
Moderate bilateral hearing loss, Cluj-Napoca

"I call my mother in Iași every week. She speaks fast Moldovan Romanian and mixes it with local phrases I no longer recognise after years abroad. Captio AI captions the whole conversation — I do not miss a word of what she says."

Elena C. 🇮🇹
elena.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Romanian diaspora in Rome

"Bank calls used to be a nightmare — automated menus in fast Romanian, press one for this, two for that. I now follow the whole menu and the agent's instructions clearly. Captio AI made banking by phone possible again."

Vlad T. 🇷🇴
vlad.t***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Timișoara

"CNAS callbacks are the worst — fast formal Romanian with medical vocabulary and zero patience for questions. With Captio AI I read every word in real time and finally understand what I am supposed to do next with my referral."

Ioana P. 🇷🇴
ioana.p***@gmail.com
Sensorineural hearing loss, Bucharest

"My colleagues in Bucharest speak a different Romanian from what I grew up with in Transylvania. Captio AI handles both dialects without missing a beat — I follow our weekly team call from start to finish for the first time."

Andrei M. 🇷🇴
andrei.m***@gmail.com
Moderate bilateral hearing loss, Cluj-Napoca

"I call my mother in Iași every week. She speaks fast Moldovan Romanian and mixes it with local phrases I no longer recognise after years abroad. Captio AI captions the whole conversation — I do not miss a word of what she says."

Elena C. 🇮🇹
elena.c***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Romanian diaspora in Rome

"Bank calls used to be a nightmare — automated menus in fast Romanian, press one for this, two for that. I now follow the whole menu and the agent's instructions clearly. Captio AI made banking by phone possible again."

Vlad T. 🇷🇴
vlad.t***@gmail.com
Age-related hearing loss, Timișoara

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Follow every call in Romanian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store