Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Czech live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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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 traditional Czech pivnice in Prague or Brno, where the conversation flows quickly over beer and the background noise of a busy evening crowd fills the room.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in Prague's business districts where formal Czech mixes with English and following client conversation across a restaurant table matters.

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at a Prague or Brno kavárna, where the clink of coffee cups and nearby conversations compete with the person sitting across from you.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out in the Czech Republic as a visitor, where Czech menus and fast server recommendations are a challenge to follow even for intermediate Czech learners.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a Czech restaurant — name days, birthdays, Christmas dinners — where multiple conversations happen at once and the cheer of a full table makes lip-reading nearly impossible.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a cosy Prague wine bar or a Brno restaurant where background music and the warm ambience make following quiet conversation harder than expected.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Czech
90.3%

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.

Czech

Why Czech is hard to understand

The unique ř phoneme

  • A sound found in almost no other language
  • Czech contains /r̝/, written as ř — a raised alveolar non-sonorant trill found in almost no other language on earth. It appears in everyday words like řekl, tři, and moře, and is produced far back in the mouth with no distinctive lip shape. At a Czech restaurant table, this sound appears constantly and is completely invisible to lip-reading.

Dense consonant clusters

  • Consonants stack without any vowels to break them up
  • Czech famously allows syllabic consonants, producing sequences like strč prst skrz krk with no vowels at all. In natural restaurant speech, these consonant-heavy words compress into dense rapid bursts with minimal lip information — a deaf diner watching the lips of a speaker in a Prague pivnice sees very little that helps.

Bohemian-Moravian dialect divide

  • Brno Czech sounds different from Prague Czech
  • Czech has three dialect regions in Bohemia, four in Moravia, and two in Czech Silesia. Moravian Czech differs notably in vowel qualities and intonation patterns from Prague standard. A deaf person at a restaurant in Brno or Ostrava faces a distinct phonological register — even within what is nominally the same language.

Vowel length minimal pairs

  • Long vs. short vowels change meaning — invisibly
  • Czech distinguishes three vowel lengths that change word meaning: a short /a/ and a long /á/ are completely different words. This length distinction is invisible on the lips and is also imperceptible even for hearing people in fast speech. At a restaurant, common minimal pairs — pas/pás, rada/ráda — blur together.

Fast casual elision

  • Friday-night Czech sounds nothing like the textbook
  • In casual Czech at a restaurant or pivnice, words run together and unstressed syllables disappear entirely. 'Já nevím' becomes 'nevím,' prepositions and articles attach to following words in speech streams. The gap between careful Czech and the fast speech of a Friday evening dinner is enormous.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in the Czech Republic: legal recognition and everyday gaps

Czech Sign Language (Český znakový jazyk, ČZJ) has been legally recognized since 1998, making the Czech Republic one of the earlier Central European countries to grant sign language formal status. Yet legal recognition does not automatically translate to accessibility in everyday settings. Restaurant environments — with high ambient noise, no captioning infrastructure, and no obligation on hospitality businesses to provide interpreters — remain among the most challenging daily settings for deaf Czechs. Globally, the GBD 2019 study estimated 1.57 billion people living with hearing loss (PMC7960691).

Genetic research conducted in the Moravian-Silesian population of the Czech Republic has identified specific mutation patterns associated with nonsyndromic hearing loss in that region, suggesting a higher-than-average genetic predisposition in certain parts of the country (PMC6037260). This genetic dimension adds to the broader picture of hearing loss as a challenge that affects Czech families across generations and geographies — not only in cities but in smaller towns and rural areas with fewer accessibility services.

Captio AI captions Czech conversation in real time — at a pivnice in Brno, a kavárna in Prague, or a family Christmas dinner table — so a deaf person can follow every word 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

"Family Christmas dinner at a restaurant in Vinohrady — everyone talking over each other in fast Prague Czech. Captio AI kept up with all of it. First Christmas dinner where I actually knew what the family was planning for next year."

Tereza N. 🇨🇿
tereza.n***@gmail.com
Praha, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Brno where my clients spoke fast Moravian Czech. Captio AI handled the accent perfectly — I didn't miss a single detail of the meeting."

Marek K. 🇨🇿
marek.k***@gmail.com
Brno, moderate progressive loss

"The ř sound is impossible to lip-read — it looks like nothing. Captio AI catches it every time. Words like tři and řekl that look identical on the lips now come through correctly in the captions."

Jana H. 🇨🇿
jana.h***@gmail.com
Ostrava, profound bilateral loss

"Friday evening at a Prague pivnice — loud, crowded, everyone talking at once. I put my phone on the table and followed the whole conversation for the first time in years."

Ondřej V. 🇨🇿
ondrej.v***@gmail.com
Praha, hearing loss from noise exposure

"Family Christmas dinner at a restaurant in Vinohrady — everyone talking over each other in fast Prague Czech. Captio AI kept up with all of it. First Christmas dinner where I actually knew what the family was planning for next year."

Tereza N. 🇨🇿
tereza.n***@gmail.com
Praha, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Brno where my clients spoke fast Moravian Czech. Captio AI handled the accent perfectly — I didn't miss a single detail of the meeting."

Marek K. 🇨🇿
marek.k***@gmail.com
Brno, moderate progressive loss

"The ř sound is impossible to lip-read — it looks like nothing. Captio AI catches it every time. Words like tři and řekl that look identical on the lips now come through correctly in the captions."

Jana H. 🇨🇿
jana.h***@gmail.com
Ostrava, profound bilateral loss

"Friday evening at a Prague pivnice — loud, crowded, everyone talking at once. I put my phone on the table and followed the whole conversation for the first time in years."

Ondřej V. 🇨🇿
ondrej.v***@gmail.com
Praha, hearing loss from noise exposure

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Czech.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store