Albanian live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
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Everything you need to follow Albanian restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Albanian speakers.
Follow the conversation through the noise
- Captions the person across the table in real time
- Works through typical restaurant background noise
- Place the phone between you — no adjustment needed
- No lip reading, no facing the speaker
Restaurants abroad or with foreign speakers
- They speak their language — you read in yours
- For waitstaff, companions, or travel dining
- 60+ languages, no setup
- Translates in real time as they speak
Transcribe any recorded conversation
- Record and get the full conversation in writing
- Review anything you missed after the meal
- Organised by speaker
- Any language, any format
Key points from any conversation
- Important points extracted from any recording
- Useful for business lunches and important catch-ups
- Organised into clear sections
- Works on any saved recording
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreEvery situation covered
Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.
Dinner with friends at a traditional Albanian restaurant in Tirana or Pristina, where conversation flows fast over byrek and tavë kosi and the noise of a lively evening fills the room.
Business lunches in Tirana's city centre where formal Albanian mixes with English and following client detail across a busy restaurant table matters.
Café catch-ups at a Tirana or Prizren café, where the ambient noise of a busy café and nearby conversations compete with the person sitting across from you.
Eating out in Albania or Kosovo as a visitor, where Albanian menus and server explanations come fast and knowing what you are ordering from traditional Albanian cuisine matters.
Family celebrations at an Albanian restaurant — bajram dinners, engagements, weddings — where the whole extended family talks at once and traditional music fills the room.
Dates at a restaurant in Tirana's Blloku district or a Prizren old-town café where you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves.
Most accurate and fastest models
word accuracy
independent benchmark, 2025
real-time captions
first word appears as you speak
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Built for the table — however noisy the room
Follows the person across the table
Point the microphone toward the person speaking and Captio AI captions them through the background noise. You do not need to face them, watch their lips, or lean in.
Works through restaurant noise
Restaurant noise averages 80 dBA — well above comfortable conversation level. Captio AI is built for these real environments, not quiet controlled rooms.
Place it and forget it
Put the phone on the table between you and the other person, microphone facing them. You glance at it as needed. No adjusting between sentences, no managing the setup.
No asking for repeats during the meal
Every word appears in real time. If you missed something, the caption is there — you do not need to stop the conversation and ask anyone to say it again.
Any language
For restaurants abroad, multilingual dining companions, or waitstaff who speak a different language. Live Translator captions and translates in real time with no manual setup.
Discreet
A phone on a restaurant table is unremarkable. Captio AI runs quietly, the screen faces you, and most dining companions adapt naturally once they understand what it does.
Why Albanian is hard to understand
Gheg-Tosk phonological divide
- The same word sounds different by dialect
- Albanian's two major dialects — Gheg (northern Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia) and Tosk (southern Albania, Standard Albanian) — differ substantially in their vowel inventories. At a restaurant table with guests from both northern and southern Albania or the diaspora, the same word arrives in Gheg or Tosk form — sometimes with completely different sounds and no stable lip pattern.
Gheg nasal vowels
- Nasalized vowels with no visible lip shape
- Gheg Albanian has nasal vowels — /ã/, /ẽ/, /ĩ/, /õ/, /ũ/ — that Tosk lacks entirely. These nasalized vowels are produced with air flowing through the nose, leaving no distinguishing trace on the lips or face. At a restaurant in Kosovo, northern Albania, or Skopje, nasal vowels appear constantly and are entirely invisible to lip-reading.
Rhotacism — /n/ becomes /r/ in Tosk
- The same word ends differently in each dialect
- A historic sound change turned /n/ into /r/ in Tosk Albanian in certain positions (gjarpën in Gheg, gjarpër in Tosk). At a mixed restaurant table, the same word arrives with a nasal or rhotic ending depending on the speaker's background — creating unpredictable lip patterns for anyone trying to track speech visually.
Albanian-Italian code-switching
- Italian arrives without warning in diaspora settings
- Albanian diaspora communities in Italy number over 400,000, and code-switching between Albanian and Italian is common at restaurant tables in diaspora communities and in Albanian restaurants abroad. A deaf Albanian diner is suddenly confronted with Italian phonology mid-conversation without any signal.
Fast consonant cluster compression
- Albanian consonant clusters compress in casual speech
- Albanian has a rich consonant inventory and consonant clusters that compress significantly in casual conversational speech. At a restaurant table in Tirana or Pristina, fast everyday speech collapses initial clusters and runs words together in a way that is hard to segment visually.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Albania: limited data and developing disability infrastructure
Albania is a developing country that has made formal commitments to disability rights as part of its EU accession process, ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and introducing anti-discrimination legislation covering people with hearing impairments. However, the infrastructure for deaf communication access — sign language interpreters, captioned public services, accessible hospitality environments — remains in early development. Globally, the GBD 2019 study estimated 1.57 billion people living with hearing loss (PMC7960691), and the WHO notes that nearly 80% of people with disabling hearing loss live in low- and middle-income countries.
Albanian Sign Language (Gjuha e Shenjave Shqipe, GJSH) and the related Kosovo Sign Language (KSL) serve distinct deaf communities in Albania and Kosovo respectively. The two varieties are not identical and reflect the different development trajectories of the two countries' deaf education systems. For deaf Albanians and Kosovars, everyday settings — restaurants, cafés, family dinners — represent communication challenges that neither state has yet fully addressed through accessible public infrastructure.
Captio AI captions Albanian conversation in real time — at a Tirana restaurant, a Pristina café, or a family bajram dinner — so a deaf person can follow every exchange from the table without needing a sign language interpreter present.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreWhat 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.
Private by default
Download on theApp StoreCaptio AI supports 60+ languages
People love Captio AI
"Family dinner at a restaurant in Blloku — Gheg-speaking relatives from the north mixing with southern Tosk at the table. Captio AI captured both dialects. First family dinner where I followed the whole conversation."
"Business lunch in Pristina where my client mixed Albanian with English constantly. Captio AI captured both. I didn't miss a single detail of the project discussion."
"Shkodër Gheg is very different from Standard Albanian. I was nervous the app wouldn't handle the accent. It managed everything — the nasal vowels, the speed, all of it."
"A traditional restaurant in Tirana is loud and fast. I used to just watch and guess. Now I point my phone at whoever is talking and read every word. It changes everything."
"Family dinner at a restaurant in Blloku — Gheg-speaking relatives from the north mixing with southern Tosk at the table. Captio AI captured both dialects. First family dinner where I followed the whole conversation."
"Business lunch in Pristina where my client mixed Albanian with English constantly. Captio AI captured both. I didn't miss a single detail of the project discussion."
"Shkodër Gheg is very different from Standard Albanian. I was nervous the app wouldn't handle the accent. It managed everything — the nasal vowels, the speed, all of it."
"A traditional restaurant in Tirana is loud and fast. I used to just watch and guess. Now I point my phone at whoever is talking and read every word. It changes everything."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Albanian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store