Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Macedonian 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

An evening meal with friends at a Skopje restoran, everyone talking fast and the conversation jumping between topics and regional accents.

💼Business lunches

A business lunch in the city where colleagues mix formal Macedonian with loanwords and occasional English project terms.

Cafe catch-ups

Coffee in a café in Ohrid's old town, the server speaking western Macedonian dialect to another customer while you order.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Ordering in a restaurant with a long menu of traditional dishes whose names are rattled off at pace in a regional variety you don't recognise.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

A family celebration — a name-day dinner or engagement party — where multiple generations sit at one long table and toasts shift from Macedonian to Albanian and back.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

A quiet dinner for two where background music and soft voices make word boundaries blur across the table.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Macedonian
87.6%

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.

Macedonian

Why Macedonian is hard to understand

Unique palatal affricates

  • ќ and ѓ invisible on the lips
  • Macedonian is the only South Slavic language with two palatal stop-affricate phonemes — /c/ (ќ) and /ɟ/ (ѓ). These sounds are produced at a retracted palatal position with minimal labial movement, making them nearly invisible on the lips and frequently misread in fast restaurant conversation.

Fixed stress shifting in loanwords

  • Stress falls unpredictably on menus and names
  • Standard Macedonian places stress on the antepenultimate syllable (third from the end). In loanwords, proper names, and menu items common in restaurant settings, this pattern shifts unpredictably. A deaf person who relies on stress position for word segmentation encounters a higher error rate than in formal speech.

Western-Eastern dialect divide

  • Ohrid and Štip sound different
  • Western dialects (Ohrid, Struga, Bitola) and eastern dialects (Štip, Kočani) differ in vowel realisation and consonant inventory. The standard language is based on the western Ohrid area, but city speech in Skopje and northern regions follows a different phonological norm — unfamiliar to a deaf person trained on broadcast Macedonian.

Macedonian-Albanian code-switching

  • Language shifts in mixed neighbourhoods
  • In western Macedonia and in Skopje's ethnically mixed areas, Macedonian and Albanian shift freely in restaurant and café conversation. For a deaf Macedonian speaker, a switch into Albanian — with its entirely different consonant inventory — breaks the visual parsing of the conversation without warning.

Fast urban Skopje speech

  • Colloquial register compresses significantly
  • Colloquial Skopje Macedonian compresses vowels, elides word-final syllables, and increases tempo significantly compared to formal speech. At a busy restaurant table, this casual register reduces the visible signal that lip-readers depend on to keep up with the conversation.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in North Macedonia: gaps in data and daily access

Country-specific hearing loss statistics for North Macedonia are limited in published research, but the GBD 2019 Study — the most comprehensive global estimate — found that approximately 1.57 billion people worldwide had some degree of hearing loss, with an estimated 430 million experiencing disabling hearing loss. Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans show rates consistent with global averages, suggesting that North Macedonia's roughly 2 million population includes tens of thousands of people managing significant hearing loss in daily life without formal support.

North Macedonia ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2011, but disability rights monitoring has noted persistent gaps in implementation — particularly in healthcare access, educational provision, and workplace accommodation for people with hearing impairments. As in many smaller Balkan countries, disability infrastructure concentrates in the capital, leaving deaf and hard of hearing people in Bitola, Ohrid, and Tetovo with fewer resources and less consistent provision.

Captio AI captions live Macedonian conversation in real time — so sitting down to a meal in Skopje, whether for business or a family celebration, means being part of the conversation from the first word.

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 busy Skopje restoran is the hardest environment I know — fast colloquial Macedonian, background TV, everyone overlapping. Captio AI gives me the full text and I finally participate instead of piecing things together after the fact."

Elena T. 🇲🇰
elena.t***@gmail.com
Skopje, profound hearing loss since childhood

"The western Macedonian dialect in Ohrid is different enough from Skopje speech that restaurant lunches with visitors from the capital used to be confusing. Captio AI handles both without any setting changes."

Bojan N. 🇲🇰
bojan.n***@gmail.com
Ohrid, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Name-day dinners in Bitola are enormous and everyone talks at once. The ќ and ѓ sounds used to disappear entirely when I lip-read. Captio AI catches them and the whole conversation makes sense now."

Marija S. 🇲🇰
marija.s***@gmail.com
Bitola, sensorineural hearing loss, hearing aid user

"In Tetovo the table conversation mixes Macedonian and Albanian depending on who's speaking. I used to lose the thread every time someone switched. With Captio AI I follow the whole meal — both languages."

Aleksandar G. 🇲🇰
aleksandar.g***@gmail.com
Tetovo, age-related hearing loss

"A busy Skopje restoran is the hardest environment I know — fast colloquial Macedonian, background TV, everyone overlapping. Captio AI gives me the full text and I finally participate instead of piecing things together after the fact."

Elena T. 🇲🇰
elena.t***@gmail.com
Skopje, profound hearing loss since childhood

"The western Macedonian dialect in Ohrid is different enough from Skopje speech that restaurant lunches with visitors from the capital used to be confusing. Captio AI handles both without any setting changes."

Bojan N. 🇲🇰
bojan.n***@gmail.com
Ohrid, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Name-day dinners in Bitola are enormous and everyone talks at once. The ќ and ѓ sounds used to disappear entirely when I lip-read. Captio AI catches them and the whole conversation makes sense now."

Marija S. 🇲🇰
marija.s***@gmail.com
Bitola, sensorineural hearing loss, hearing aid user

"In Tetovo the table conversation mixes Macedonian and Albanian depending on who's speaking. I used to lose the thread every time someone switched. With Captio AI I follow the whole meal — both languages."

Aleksandar G. 🇲🇰
aleksandar.g***@gmail.com
Tetovo, age-related hearing loss

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Macedonian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store