Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Croatian 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

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

🍽️Dinner with friends

Dinner with friends at a Zagreb restoran or a traditional Dalmatian konoba, where the conversation flows naturally over prstaci and local wine and the noise of a full evening table fills the room.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in Zagreb's business district where formal Croatian mixes with English and following client detail across a busy restaurant matters.

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at a Zagreb kavana or a Split harbour café, where the ambient noise of a busy city and nearby conversations compete with the person across from you.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out in Croatia as a visitor, where Croatian menus and server explanations vary by region — Dalmatian konoba menus sound different from Zagreb city restaurants.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a Croatian restaurant — birthdays, anniversaries, Krsna slava dinners — where multiple conversations happen at once and Croatian pop or Dalmatian klapa music fills the room.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a Dubrovnik old town restaurant or a Hvar harbour terrace where you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves over the sound of the sea.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Croatian
90.5%

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.

Croatian

Why Croatian is hard to understand

Four pitch accents

  • Short rising, short falling, long rising, long falling — invisible
  • Standard Croatian has four pitch accents — short rising, short falling, long rising, and long falling — a prosodic system that changes word meaning but is completely invisible on the lips and face. At a Zagreb restoran table, a deaf diner watching lips cannot distinguish which of the four accents a word carries, losing information that is essential to understanding what is being said.

Štokavian-Čakavian-Kajkavian divide

  • Zagreb, Split, and Dubrovnik each sound different
  • Croatian has three major dialect groups: Štokavian (the basis of Standard Croatian), Čakavian (Dalmatian coast and islands), and Kajkavian (Zagreb region). These dialects differ substantially in vocabulary, phonology, and prosody. A deaf person accustomed to Zagreb Kajkavian faces a genuinely different phonological system at a restaurant on Hvar or in Dubrovnik.

Ijekavian vowel alternations

  • Historical /ě/ appears as /ije/ or /je/ depending on context
  • Standard Croatian uses Ijekavian forms, where the historical vowel /ě/ becomes /ije/ or /je/ depending on syllable length. This creates vowel sequences that vary by word in ways that cannot be predicted from the consonant structure — making the overall visual rhythm of Croatian conversation harder to segment than languages with simpler vowel systems.

Fast Dalmatian coastal speech

  • Coastal Croatian is rapid and distinctively clipped
  • Čakavian and Dalmatian coastal Croatian is spoken at a rapid, clipped pace with distinctive intonation. The coastal Croatian heard at a Split konoba or a Dubrovnik restaurant differs markedly from Zagreb standard — and the speed and reduction of coastal speech make lip-reading particularly challenging for a deaf diner accustomed to inland varieties.

Croatian-English-Italian mixing

  • Three languages appear at coastal tourist restaurants
  • In Croatia's coastal restaurants, Croatian mixes with English and Italian naturally — particularly during tourist season. A deaf Croatian at a Dubrovnik restaurant table may encounter all three phonological systems in a single dinner, each requiring a different lip-reading strategy and arriving without any signal of a switch.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Croatia: a recognized community navigating everyday barriers

Croatia's deaf and hard-of-hearing community has one of the longest-established deaf organizations in the region: the Croatian Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, founded in 1921, today has approximately 9,000 members in 23 local organizations. In the 2011 census, 13,230 persons in Croatia were recorded with hearing impairment, of whom 2,763 were classified as having major disability. Croatian Sign Language (HZJ) was formally recognized in law in 2015, one of the later Central European sign language recognitions. The state provides hearing aids to those with hearing loss exceeding 40 dB HL, but accessibility in everyday social settings — restaurants, cafés, tourist venues — remains limited.

Research has validated screening tools for identifying hearing loss in Croatian elderly populations (PMC12452682, 2025), and studies on deaf education in Croatia have documented the challenges facing the deaf community in accessing mainstream social environments (PMC3583401). For deaf Croatians and tourists visiting Croatia, the challenge of following conversation at a restaurant table — where the phonological system varies dramatically by region and tourist-season code-switching with English and Italian is common — is one that policy has not yet addressed through accessible public infrastructure. Globally, the GBD 2019 study estimated 1.57 billion people living with hearing loss (PMC7960691).

Captio AI captions Croatian conversation in real time — at a Zagreb restoran, a Split konoba, or a Dubrovnik old-town restaurant — so a deaf person can follow every exchange from the table without needing an interpreter.

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

"Birthday dinner at a Zagreb restoran — eight people talking at once over strukli and wine. Captio AI followed the whole table. First birthday dinner where I actually understood every plan being made."

Ana M. 🇭🇷
ana.m***@gmail.com
Zagreb, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Split where my client spoke fast Dalmatian Croatian. Captio AI handled the accent and pace without any issues — I didn't miss a single detail."

Tomislav K. 🇭🇷
tomislav.k***@gmail.com
Split, moderate progressive loss

"A Dubrovnik konoba in high season — Croatian, English, and Italian all at the same table. Captio AI switched between all three. I followed the whole dinner for the first time."

Maja P. 🇭🇷
maja.p***@gmail.com
Dubrovnik, profound bilateral loss

"The four pitch accents in Croatian look completely identical on the lips. Captio AI distinguishes them every time. Words I used to consistently misread now come through correctly."

Ivan B. 🇭🇷
ivan.b***@gmail.com
Rijeka, hearing loss since 30s

"Birthday dinner at a Zagreb restoran — eight people talking at once over strukli and wine. Captio AI followed the whole table. First birthday dinner where I actually understood every plan being made."

Ana M. 🇭🇷
ana.m***@gmail.com
Zagreb, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Split where my client spoke fast Dalmatian Croatian. Captio AI handled the accent and pace without any issues — I didn't miss a single detail."

Tomislav K. 🇭🇷
tomislav.k***@gmail.com
Split, moderate progressive loss

"A Dubrovnik konoba in high season — Croatian, English, and Italian all at the same table. Captio AI switched between all three. I followed the whole dinner for the first time."

Maja P. 🇭🇷
maja.p***@gmail.com
Dubrovnik, profound bilateral loss

"The four pitch accents in Croatian look completely identical on the lips. Captio AI distinguishes them every time. Words I used to consistently misread now come through correctly."

Ivan B. 🇭🇷
ivan.b***@gmail.com
Rijeka, hearing loss since 30s

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Croatian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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