Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Hungarian 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

Download on theApp Store
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 Hungarian vendéglő or étterem, where the conversation moves fast over food and the noise of a busy restaurant makes lip-reading even harder than usual.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in Budapest's downtown where formal Hungarian mixes with English business terms and understanding client conversation across the table matters.

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at a Budapest kávéház — one of the grand old coffeehouses or a modern coffee bar — where ambient noise and multiple nearby conversations compete with yours.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out in Hungary as a visitor, where Hungarian menus and server explanations arrive fast and the language's agglutinative complexity makes even simple phrases hard to parse.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a Hungarian restaurant — name days, birthdays, Easter dinners — where the whole extended family talks simultaneously and folk or pop music fills the room.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a restaurant on the Danube promenade or in Budapest's ruin bar district where you want to catch every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Hungarian
94.4%

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.

Hungarian

Why Hungarian is hard to understand

14-vowel long-short pairs

  • Vowel length changes meaning — invisibly
  • Hungarian distinguishes 14 vowels — seven short and seven long — and vowel length alone changes word meaning. A short /o/ and a long /ó/ are completely different words, but the lip shape for both is identical. At a Hungarian restaurant table, this invisible distinction causes deaf diners to misread common words constantly.

Vowel harmony in agglutinative suffixes

  • Grammar encoded in vowels that blur at speed
  • Like Turkic languages, Hungarian uses vowel harmony: suffixes alternate between front and back vowel variants to encode grammatical meaning. In fast dinner conversation, these suffix vowels blur together — and the information they carry about who is doing what and to whom effectively disappears from the visible signal.

Geminate consonants

  • Double consonants change meaning — with nothing to see
  • Hungarian distinguishes single from double (geminate) consonants: megy (goes) vs. meggy (sour cherry), hal (fish) vs. hall (hears). These length distinctions are entirely acoustic — there is nothing visible on the lips to signal whether a consonant is single or doubled — yet they change the word's meaning completely.

Agglutinative word-final compression

  • The grammatically important parts come last — and disappear
  • Hungarian is verb-final and highly agglutinative, so the most grammatically important elements come at the end of long words. In fast restaurant conversation, these word-final suffix chains are compressed, reduced, and often swallowed — the part a deaf person most needs to catch is the part most likely to be lost.

Standard-dialect gap

  • Budapest Hungarian sounds different from the countryside
  • Educated Colloquial Hungarian (ECH), spoken in Budapest, differs markedly from traditional regional dialects in Debrecen, Pécs, or Miskolc. Regional vowel and consonant patterns create a phonological environment that can differ significantly from what a Budapest-trained lip-reader expects at a restaurant outside the capital.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Hungary: legal recognition, unmet daily needs

Hungarian Sign Language (HSL) was officially recognized in 2009, one of the earlier recognitions in Central Europe, and the National Federation of Deaf and Hard of Hearing People (SINOSZ) has long advocated for accessible communication across Hungarian public life. Yet legal recognition does not automatically produce accessibility in everyday settings. The hospitality sector — restaurants, cafés, bars — operates largely without real-time captioning or interpreter provision, and EU-funded public building accessibility requirements do not extend to private dining environments. Globally, the GBD 2019 study estimated 1.57 billion people living with hearing loss (PMC7960691).

Research published in 2025 found that stigma, socio-cultural differences, and accessibility barriers compound the daily experience of hearing loss across European countries, including Central European states where policy frameworks exist but enforcement and infrastructure lag behind (PMC12101339, Audiology Research). For Hungarian deaf and hard-of-hearing people, this means that even with legal protections in place, navigating daily social settings — ordering at a restaurant, following a business lunch, joining a family dinner — requires workarounds that hearing peers do not need.

Captio AI captions Hungarian conversation in real time — at a vendéglő in Pécs, a kávéház in Budapest, or a family name-day dinner — so a deaf person can follow every exchange without waiting for an interpreter that the law does not require the restaurant to provide.

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 name-day dinner at a restaurant in Óbuda — eight relatives talking at once in fast Budapest Hungarian. Captio AI followed every word. I finally understood the family plans being made around me."

Katalin N. 🇭🇺
katalin.n***@gmail.com
Budapest, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Debrecen where my client spoke with a strong Eastern Hungarian accent, very different from Budapest standard. Captio AI captured it accurately — I didn't miss anything important."

Péter V. 🇭🇺
peter.v***@gmail.com
Debrecen, moderate progressive loss

"The geminate consonants in Hungarian — megy vs meggy, hal vs hall — look completely identical on the lips. Captio AI distinguishes them every time. That alone makes the app worth everything to me."

Ágnes H. 🇭🇺
agnes.h***@gmail.com
Pécs, profound bilateral loss since birth

"Dinner in a Budapest ruin bar — loud music, crowded, stone walls echoing everything. Captio AI cut through it all and I followed the whole table conversation."

Bálint K. 🇭🇺
balint.k***@gmail.com
Budapest, progressive hearing loss

"Family name-day dinner at a restaurant in Óbuda — eight relatives talking at once in fast Budapest Hungarian. Captio AI followed every word. I finally understood the family plans being made around me."

Katalin N. 🇭🇺
katalin.n***@gmail.com
Budapest, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Debrecen where my client spoke with a strong Eastern Hungarian accent, very different from Budapest standard. Captio AI captured it accurately — I didn't miss anything important."

Péter V. 🇭🇺
peter.v***@gmail.com
Debrecen, moderate progressive loss

"The geminate consonants in Hungarian — megy vs meggy, hal vs hall — look completely identical on the lips. Captio AI distinguishes them every time. That alone makes the app worth everything to me."

Ágnes H. 🇭🇺
agnes.h***@gmail.com
Pécs, profound bilateral loss since birth

"Dinner in a Budapest ruin bar — loud music, crowded, stone walls echoing everything. Captio AI cut through it all and I followed the whole table conversation."

Bálint K. 🇭🇺
balint.k***@gmail.com
Budapest, progressive hearing loss

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Hungarian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store