Bulgarian live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store
Everything you need to follow Bulgarian restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Bulgarian 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 Bulgarian mehana in Sofia or Plovdiv, where the conversation flows fast over shared meze dishes and the warm noise of a lively restaurant fills the room.
Business lunches in Sofia's city centre where formal Bulgarian mixes with English and following client conversation across a crowded restaurant table matters.
Café catch-ups at a Sofia café or traditional kafene, where ambient noise and multiple nearby conversations compete with the person sitting across from you.
Eating out in Bulgaria as a visitor, where Bulgarian menus and server explanations come fast and knowing what you are ordering from traditional Bulgarian cuisine matters.
Family celebrations at a Bulgarian restaurant — name days, birthdays, Easter and Christmas dinners — where multiple conversations happen at once and folk music fills the room.
Dates at a restaurant in Sofia's old quarter or Plovdiv's pedestrian zone 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 Bulgarian is hard to understand
Palatalization pairs
- The same lip shape produces two different sounds
- Bulgarian consonants come in hard and soft (palatalized) pairs that change word meaning. In fast restaurant conversation, a hard consonant and its palatalized counterpart are completely indistinguishable on the lips — the same visible position produces two different sounds with two completely different meanings. At a Sofia mehana table, this constant ambiguity leaves a deaf diner guessing.
The sixth vowel — /ɐ/ (ъ)
- A central vowel with no visible lip movement
- Bulgarian has six vowels, including the central unrounded /ɐ/ (written ъ) — a sound found in very few European languages. This vowel appears in common words and is produced at the center of the mouth with almost no visible lip shape. At a Bulgarian restaurant table, words containing ъ leave nothing readable on the lips.
Vowel reduction
- Unstressed vowels change in fast speech
- Bulgarian reduces unstressed vowels in casual speech — /o/ shifts toward /u/ and other unstressed vowels reduce similarly. Words sound different from their dictionary forms at natural conversational pace. At a Sofia restaurant, a deaf person trying to match a word to a lip pattern may be looking for the wrong shape entirely.
Variable stress across dialects
- The same word arrives with stress in different places
- Bulgarian dialects place stress on different syllables. At a restaurant table with guests from different Bulgarian regions — Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna, or the Rhodopes — the same word arrives with stress in a different position, shifting the visible rhythm and making the lip-read pattern inconsistent.
Bulgarian-Turkish mixing
- Turkish words arrive in regions with mixed populations
- In parts of southern and northeastern Bulgaria with significant Turkish-speaking populations, restaurant conversation mixes Bulgarian and Turkish naturally. A deaf diner accustomed to Bulgarian lip patterns is suddenly confronted with Turkish phonology — a completely different consonant inventory — at the same table.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Bulgaria: 120,000 people and a fragmented support system
According to data compiled by the European Union of the Deaf, there are approximately 120,000 people with hearing disabilities in Bulgaria — but only around 50,000 of them are able to communicate through Bulgarian Sign Language (BulSL). The gap between the total deaf and hard-of-hearing population and those with access to sign language communication reflects a broader shortage of sign language education, qualified interpreters, and accessible public services across the country.
Social research published in the journal Scripta Scientifica Vox Studentium found that while Bulgarian deaf people experience high levels of acceptance within their immediate families, broader societal preparedness to interact with deaf individuals is low. This forces many deaf Bulgarians to live in small, largely isolated social groups — significantly limiting their participation in everyday settings including restaurants, cafés, and social dining situations that hearing people take for granted. Globally, the GBD 2019 study estimated 1.57 billion people living with hearing loss (PMC7960691), making this a challenge of scale that resonates far beyond Bulgaria.
Captio AI captions Bulgarian conversation in real time — at a Sofia mehana, a Plovdiv restaurant terrace, or a family name-day dinner — so a deaf person can follow every exchange from the table without needing a sign language interpreter who may not be available.
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 name-day dinner at a mehana in Lozenets — eight relatives talking at once over shopska salad and banitsa. Captio AI followed the whole table. First celebration where I actually knew what was being planned."
"Business lunch in Plovdiv old town — my client switched between Bulgarian and English every few sentences. Captio AI captured both perfectly. I didn't miss a single detail of the negotiation."
"At a Varna sea-view restaurant with a mixed table — some guests from Sofia, some from the Rhodopes. The stress patterns were so different. Captio AI kept up with all of it without any trouble."
"Sofia restaurants are loud. I used to just watch people's faces and guess. Now I put my phone on the table and read every word in real time — it completely changes going out."
"Family name-day dinner at a mehana in Lozenets — eight relatives talking at once over shopska salad and banitsa. Captio AI followed the whole table. First celebration where I actually knew what was being planned."
"Business lunch in Plovdiv old town — my client switched between Bulgarian and English every few sentences. Captio AI captured both perfectly. I didn't miss a single detail of the negotiation."
"At a Varna sea-view restaurant with a mixed table — some guests from Sofia, some from the Rhodopes. The stress patterns were so different. Captio AI kept up with all of it without any trouble."
"Sofia restaurants are loud. I used to just watch people's faces and guess. Now I put my phone on the table and read every word in real time — it completely changes going out."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Bulgarian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store