Romanian 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 Romanian restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Romanian 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 friends at a traditional Romanian restaurant — a cramă or a local cârciumă — where the conversation moves fast and background folk music competes with what people are saying.
Business lunches in Bucharest or Cluj, where formal Romanian mixes with English corporate terms and following the detail of a negotiation across the table matters.
Café catch-ups at a Bucharest terasă or coffee house, where the ambient noise of a busy outdoor café and passing trams make it hard to follow even close conversation.
Eating out in Romania as a visitor, where Romanian menus and server explanations vary by region — Bucharest, Iași, or Transylvania each sound different.
Family celebrations at a Romanian restaurant — name days, weddings, Easter gatherings — where multiple conversations happen at once and traditional music fills the room.
Dates at a romantic Bucharest restaurant where you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves over the background music.
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 Romanian is hard to understand
Unique sibilants and affricates
- Sounds unique to Romanian among Romance languages
- Romanian contains /ʃ/ (Ș), /t͡s/ (Ț), and /d͡ʒ/ — phonemes that set it apart from French, Spanish, and Italian and reflect centuries of Slavic contact. These sounds are produced with distinct tongue positions but minimal visible lip movement. At a Romanian dinner table, a deaf diner watching lips misses these distinctions entirely.
Regional dialect diversity
- Moldavian, Bucharest, and Transylvanian sound different
- Romanian has three main regional registers — Moldavian (softer, more musical), Muntenian (Bucharest standard), and Transylvanian (with Hungarian influence) — that differ in vowel quality, rhythm, and pace. A deaf person accustomed to Bucharest Romanian can struggle significantly at a restaurant in Iași or Cluj where the same conversation sounds distinctly different.
Fast casual reduction
- Vowels reduce and syllables disappear at speed
- In casual Romanian at a restaurant table, unstressed vowels reduce and unstressed syllables drop. The language sounds markedly faster than formal Romanian, and the vowel distinctions that differentiate one word from another in careful speech disappear in normal dinner conversation.
Romanian-Hungarian code-switching
- Two completely different phonologies at a Transylvanian table
- In Transylvania, a significant part of the population is ethnic Hungarian, and restaurant conversations in Cluj or Brașov may switch between Romanian and Hungarian without notice. A deaf person watching lips suddenly faces two completely different phonological systems at the same meal.
Loanword register mixing
- French, English, and Turkish words arrive unpredictably
- Modern Romanian absorbs loanwords from French, English, and Turkish, all pronounced with Romanian phonology but following different patterns. At a city restaurant, menus and orders blend Romanian words, French culinary terms, and English brand names — each requiring a different lip-reading strategy.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Romania: cuts to access and the social cost
Romania's deaf community faces significant social barriers compounded by decades of economic constraint. Government grants for Romanian Sign Language (RSL) interpretation have been cut during austerity periods, leaving deaf citizens without funded communication access in everyday situations — restaurants, appointments, social gatherings — that hearing people navigate without cost or effort. Sense International has documented that deaf and deafblind people in Romania face marginalization and isolation when trained interpreters are unavailable.
A cross-sectional study published in 2025 found that Romanian hearing aid users reported significantly lower perceived handicap and higher self-esteem than non-users — evidence of how dramatically access to hearing technology affects daily functioning (PMC12785415). Yet hearing device access remains uneven across Romania's urban-rural divide, and stigma associated with hearing loss compounds the challenge of seeking support. Research has documented that prejudices surrounding hearing loss historically hinder full participation in education, employment, and social interaction (PMC12101339, Audiology Research 2025).
Captio AI captions Romanian conversation in real time — at a cârciumă in Iași, a restaurant terasă in Bucharest, or a family name-day dinner anywhere in Romania — giving deaf users a way to follow every word without waiting for an interpreter.
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
"Family name-day dinner at a traditional restaurant in Floreasca — eight relatives talking at once in fast Romanian. Captio AI kept up with all of it. I actually laughed at the right moments for the first time."
"Business lunch in Cluj where my partner switched between Romanian and English every few sentences. I used to pretend I caught everything — now I actually do."
"The Moldavian accent in Iași restaurants is noticeably different from Bucharest Romanian. Captio AI handles both without missing a beat — I was surprised."
"Dates at a restaurant in the Brașov old town — background folk music, stone walls echoing everything. Captio AI cuts through it all and I follow every word."
"Family name-day dinner at a traditional restaurant in Floreasca — eight relatives talking at once in fast Romanian. Captio AI kept up with all of it. I actually laughed at the right moments for the first time."
"Business lunch in Cluj where my partner switched between Romanian and English every few sentences. I used to pretend I caught everything — now I actually do."
"The Moldavian accent in Iași restaurants is noticeably different from Bucharest Romanian. Captio AI handles both without missing a beat — I was surprised."
"Dates at a restaurant in the Brașov old town — background folk music, stone walls echoing everything. Captio AI cuts through it all and I follow every word."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Romanian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store