Polish 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 Polish restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Polish 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 family in Poland — shared bigos, pierogi, and żurek around a table — is a long, conversational occasion where overlapping Polish runs from starter to dessert. A hard of hearing person at a Polish family table needs real-time captions.
Business lunches in Warsaw or Kraków are common in Polish professional culture. Side comments in Polish — especially the ones said quietly as an aside — are often where the most important information lives.
A kaviarnia café stop for coffee and szarlotka is a daily ritual in Polish cities. Fast counter orders and conversation in rapid Polish add noise on top of the linguistic complexity.
Travelling and eating out across Poland — from a Gdańsk fish restaurant to a Zakopane highland meal — means navigating regional accents and some Silesian or Kashubian influence. Captio AI captions whatever is spoken.
Group celebrations in Poland — imieniny name day dinners, Christmas Wigilia, Easter tables — are long, loud, and involve overlapping Polish conversation across large tables. Following without captioning means missing most of the meal.
A one-on-one dinner at a quieter Kraków restaurant carries the expectation of sustained Polish conversation. Missing a sentence — especially when a nasal vowel case ending carries grammatical meaning — creates a gap that captions prevent.
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 Polish is hard to understand
Consonant cluster density
- Some of the world's most complex consonant clusters
- Polish permits consonant clusters of up to four consonants at word onsets and six medially — clusters like 'wstrząs' or 'chrząszcz' that are structurally impossible in most other languages. In fast table speech, these dense clusters are said without careful articulation, creating a wall of consonant sounds where individual phonemes are extremely difficult to isolate from lip movement alone.
Nasal vowels
- Polish nasal vowels leave no visible trace
- Polish has two phonemic nasal vowels (ą and ę) produced with air flowing through the nasal cavity — a quality produced at the velum with nothing changing on the lips. At a restaurant table, ą and ę appear constantly in grammatical endings that signal case, gender, and number — all of which are invisible to a lip-reader.
Final devoicing
- Voiced/voiceless pairs collapse at word ends
- Like German and Russian, Polish devoices final obstruents: 'ząb' (tooth) sounds like 'zap', 'grób' (grave) like 'grop'. The voiced/voiceless distinction disappears at word ends, creating additional homophones in fast restaurant speech.
Palatal consonant series
- Soft and hard consonants look identical
- Polish distinguishes palatalised (soft) from plain (hard) consonants across much of its inventory — a contrast produced by the middle of the tongue against the hard palate, deep inside the mouth. The soft/hard pairs (sz vs ś, z vs ź, c vs ć) are phonemically distinct but look the same from outside.
Fast Polish speech
- Polish spoken at pace compresses heavily
- Polish spoken in a restaurant setting is significantly compressed relative to careful speech. The characteristic sibilant clusters of Polish ('szcz', 'prz', 'trz') blur together at speed, and unstressed syllables shorten dramatically. A lip-reader following careful Polish is lost in fast social Polish.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Poland: the cost of the silent Polish table
Approximately 15.1% of Polish people report having hearing loss — a figure representing millions of people navigating daily social life, including Poland's restaurant culture. A 2023 study tracking patients qualified for hearing aids in Poland over 25 years (PMC10488362) found shifts in the age and severity profiles of those seeking hearing support, indicating a growing and evolving burden of hearing loss across the population.
Polish Sign Language (Polski Język Migowy, PJM) is the primary language of Poland's deaf community, but research on deaf education in Poland highlights language deprivation as a persistent issue — many deaf children are not exposed to sign language during the critical early years, either at home or in school. For the many deaf and hard of hearing adults who rely on lip-reading, the acoustic environment of a restaurant — background noise, fast Polish consonant clusters, overlapping voices — represents one of the hardest communication settings in daily life.
Captio AI captions Polish conversation in real time — whether a waiter in a Kraków milk bar recites the daily menu at machine-gun pace or a cousin leans across the Wigilia table to share the latest family news in fast Warsaw Polish.
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
"Polish consonant clusters at speed are a blur even for hearing people unfamiliar with the language. For me with HL it was basically impossible to follow a restaurant conversation. Captio resolves it completely."
"Business lunches in Poland always have the most important things said quietly, as an aside. I was always the last person to understand. Captio captures even the quiet remarks and I'm part of the conversation."
"Christmas Wigilia with my family is twelve courses and non-stop talking. Without Captio I was always eating while everyone else laughed at something I missed. Now I'm part of it."
"Polish nasal vowel endings tell you who and what a sentence is about — missing them means missing the grammar. Captio shows the full text and the grammar is right there to read."
"Polish consonant clusters at speed are a blur even for hearing people unfamiliar with the language. For me with HL it was basically impossible to follow a restaurant conversation. Captio resolves it completely."
"Business lunches in Poland always have the most important things said quietly, as an aside. I was always the last person to understand. Captio captures even the quiet remarks and I'm part of the conversation."
"Christmas Wigilia with my family is twelve courses and non-stop talking. Without Captio I was always eating while everyone else laughed at something I missed. Now I'm part of it."
"Polish nasal vowel endings tell you who and what a sentence is about — missing them means missing the grammar. Captio shows the full text and the grammar is right there to read."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Polish.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store