Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Bosnian live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes

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.

🍽️Dinner with friends

A long evening at a Sarajevo kafana with friends, conversation running over plates of ćevapi and backed by the sound of live sevdah music.

💼Business lunches

A business lunch in a city-centre restoran where colleagues shift between formal and casual Bosnian and the phone might ring mid-order.

Cafe catch-ups

Coffee in a small café, the barista chatting with regulars in fast local dialect while you wait for a table.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Ordering in a restaurant where the menu mixes Bosnian and Turkish-origin food names, and the server runs through the specials at pace.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

A wedding dinner at a big table — toasts being proposed, children running between chairs, multiple conversations layered on top of each other.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

A quiet dinner with a partner where soft voices and the ambient sounds of the open kitchen make word endings disappear.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Bosnian
93.4%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

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Captio AI in everyday use
Why Captio AI

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.

Bosnian

Why Bosnian is hard to understand

Four-pitch accent

  • Tone contrasts invisible on the lips
  • Bosnian, like the other South Slavic standard varieties, distinguishes four lexical pitch accents — short rising, short falling, long rising, long falling. These contrasts carry meaning but are entirely inaudible and invisible on the lips, so at a kafana table a deaf diner must resolve ambiguous words from context alone.

Palatal affricate pairs

  • Č/dž versus ć/đ look nearly the same
  • Bosnian contrasts post-alveolar affricates (č, dž) with palatal affricates (ć, đ). These paired sounds are phonemically distinct but look nearly identical in articulation — a category of visually ambiguous words that even experienced lip-readers struggle to separate reliably.

Ijekavian vowel alternations

  • The same root looks different across contexts
  • Standard Bosnian uses Ijekavian reflex: older /ě/ becomes /ije/ or /je/ depending on syllable length. In fast speech these sequences compress, so a deaf person unfamiliar with the alternation loses track of which word-form is being used across a dinner conversation.

Fast kafana speech

  • Vowels reduce and words elide at pace
  • Bosnian restaurant culture is built around leisurely but lively conversation — at a kafana, speech is fast, vowels reduce, and words elide freely. The compaction of casual register makes visible articulation less reliable than at formal speaking pace.

Turkish-origin lexical mixing

  • Ottoman loanwords appear without warning
  • Ottoman-era borrowings are woven into Bosnian food culture and casual speech — kahva, džezva, burek, ćevapi, čaršija. For a deaf person not expecting Turkish-phonology vocabulary, these sequences can appear mid-conversation and temporarily break the visual parsing of the surrounding sentences.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Bosnia and Herzegovina: a gap in the data, and in services

Reliable national disability statistics for Bosnia and Herzegovina are limited by the country's complex administrative structure, but a retrospective study of deaf and hard of hearing people registered in the country documented 1,044 individuals across employment offices and social care centres — a figure widely regarded as an undercount given barriers to formal registration. The WHO World Report on Hearing (2021) contextualised the regional picture: globally, over 1.5 billion people live with hearing loss, and the Western Balkans face the same access gaps — inadequate device provision, limited rehabilitation services, uneven policy implementation — that the report identifies as systemic in middle-income settings.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, yet implementation remains uneven across the Federation and Republika Srpska entities. Social research on group dining settings has demonstrated that communal meals present high barriers for deaf participants, combining acoustic noise, multiple simultaneous speakers, and the social expectation of reciprocal real-time conversation — a combination that concentrates exclusion precisely in the settings most central to Bosnian social life.

Captio AI captions live Bosnian conversation in real time, making a seat at the kafana table mean genuine participation, not quiet observation from the edge of the group.

Download for free

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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

"A kafana in Sarajevo is the worst acoustic environment I know — live music, everyone talking at once, fast Bosnian with Turkish words sprinkled in. Captio AI handles all of it and I followed a whole evening of conversation for the first time."

Amra H. 🇧🇦
amra.h***@gmail.com
Sarajevo, bilateral sensorineural hearing loss

"The pitch accent differences between Mostar and Sarajevo Bosnian used to trip me up at restaurant meals. Captio AI captions both without issues — I finally stopped asking people to face me when they talk."

Edin M. 🇧🇦
edin.m***@gmail.com
Mostar, moderate hearing loss, hearing aid user

"Business lunches were the hardest — fast Bosnian, the server interrupting, everyone talking over each other. With Captio AI I have the text and I can respond properly instead of guessing what I missed."

Lejla K. 🇧🇦
lejla.k***@gmail.com
Banja Luka, congenital hearing loss

"I started losing the high frequencies and restaurant dinners became exhausting. Captio AI gives me back the word endings I miss — the ć versus č distinction that changes what someone is actually saying."

Tarik B. 🇧🇦
tarik.b***@gmail.com
Tuzla, age-related high-frequency hearing loss

"A kafana in Sarajevo is the worst acoustic environment I know — live music, everyone talking at once, fast Bosnian with Turkish words sprinkled in. Captio AI handles all of it and I followed a whole evening of conversation for the first time."

Amra H. 🇧🇦
amra.h***@gmail.com
Sarajevo, bilateral sensorineural hearing loss

"The pitch accent differences between Mostar and Sarajevo Bosnian used to trip me up at restaurant meals. Captio AI captions both without issues — I finally stopped asking people to face me when they talk."

Edin M. 🇧🇦
edin.m***@gmail.com
Mostar, moderate hearing loss, hearing aid user

"Business lunches were the hardest — fast Bosnian, the server interrupting, everyone talking over each other. With Captio AI I have the text and I can respond properly instead of guessing what I missed."

Lejla K. 🇧🇦
lejla.k***@gmail.com
Banja Luka, congenital hearing loss

"I started losing the high frequencies and restaurant dinners became exhausting. Captio AI gives me back the word endings I miss — the ć versus č distinction that changes what someone is actually saying."

Tarik B. 🇧🇦
tarik.b***@gmail.com
Tuzla, age-related high-frequency hearing loss

Download for free

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Bosnian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store