Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Serbian 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 Belgrade kafana or traditional restoran, where conversation flows fast over rakija and shared plates and the sound of live folk music fills the room.

💼Business lunches

Business lunches in Belgrade's business districts where formal Serbian mixes with English and following client detail across a busy restaurant table matters.

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at a Belgrade kafić or Novi Sad café terrace, where the hum of espresso machines and nearby conversations compete with the person across from you.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out in Serbia as a visitor, where Serbian menus and server explanations come fast and knowing what you are ordering from a traditional Serbian menu matters.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a Serbian restaurant — slava gatherings, birthdays, weddings — where the whole family talks at once and live music fills the room.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a restaurant in Belgrade's Savamala district or on the Danube promenade where you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Serbian
91.9%

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.

Serbian

Why Serbian is hard to understand

Four pitch accents

  • Short rising, short falling, long rising, long falling — none visible
  • Serbian has four pitch accents — two rising and two falling, each occurring on both short and long vowels — a prosodic system found in almost no other European language. These four accent types change word meaning but are completely invisible on the lips and face. At a Belgrade kafana table, a deaf diner watching lips receives zero information about which of the four accents a word carries.

Ijekavian-Ekavian dialect split

  • The same word arrives in two different forms
  • Standard Serbian in Serbia uses Ekavian forms (reka for 'river'), while Ijekavian (rijeka) is used in Bosnia, Montenegro, and parts of Croatia. At a Serbian restaurant table with guests from across the former Yugoslavia, the same word arrives shaped differently depending on who is speaking — unpredictable lip patterns for any deaf diner trying to track speech visually.

Post-alveolar and palatal affricate pairs

  • Four affricate sounds that look identical on the lips
  • Serbian has both post-alveolar (č, dž) and palatal (ć, đ) affricates — four phonemically distinct sounds that are visually nearly identical on the lips. These distinctions appear constantly in everyday Serbian speech and cannot be distinguished by watching the speaker's mouth, yet they change the meaning of common words.

Dual-script environment

  • Cyrillic and Latin signs appear side by side
  • Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin script officially. At a Belgrade restaurant, menus, signs, and captions appear in both scripts. Deaf diners reading visual information while also watching lips navigate a written environment that itself requires extra cognitive effort to decode.

Fast kafana table speech

  • Serbian at a lively dinner is faster than formal speech
  • Serbian at a Belgrade kafana or restoran table is fast, with reduced unstressed syllables and a conversational pace that is significantly faster than careful speech. For a deaf diner, this pace removes the pauses and clear articulations that lip-reading depends on — and the four-pitch accent system still operates underneath all of it.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in Serbia: legal recognition and everyday access gaps

Serbian Sign Language gained formal legal protection under Serbia's anti-discrimination legislation, and the country has committed to disability rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. However, legal recognition does not automatically produce accessibility in everyday settings. The hospitality sector — restaurants, kafanas, cafés — operates almost entirely without captioning infrastructure or interpreter support, leaving deaf Serbians to navigate daily social dining without communication assistance. 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 in the Western Balkans where policy frameworks exist but enforcement and infrastructure lag behind (PMC12101339, Audiology Research). For deaf Serbians, this means that even with legal commitments in place, navigating a kafana dinner, following a business lunch, or joining a family slava celebration requires workarounds that hearing peers never need.

Captio AI captions Serbian conversation in real time — at a Belgrade kafana, a Novi Sad restaurant, or a family slava dinner — so a deaf person can follow every exchange from the table 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 slava dinner at a kafana in Zemun — ten people talking at once over roštilj and ajvar. Captio AI followed the whole table. First slava where I actually understood what was being celebrated."

Milica N. 🇷🇸
milica.n***@gmail.com
Beograd, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Novi Sad where my client's Vojvodina accent was very different from Belgrade standard. Captio AI captured it perfectly — I didn't miss anything important."

Marko V. 🇷🇸
marko.v***@gmail.com
Novi Sad, progressive hearing loss

"The four pitch accents in Serbian are completely invisible on the lips. Captio AI distinguishes them every time — words I used to confuse constantly now come through correctly."

Jelena P. 🇷🇸
jelena.p***@gmail.com
Beograd, moderate bilateral loss

"Restaurants in Niš are loud and everyone talks fast. I put my phone on the table and read the conversation in real time. Going out with friends is completely different now."

Stefan K. 🇷🇸
stefan.k***@gmail.com
Niš, profound loss since childhood

"Family slava dinner at a kafana in Zemun — ten people talking at once over roštilj and ajvar. Captio AI followed the whole table. First slava where I actually understood what was being celebrated."

Milica N. 🇷🇸
milica.n***@gmail.com
Beograd, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Novi Sad where my client's Vojvodina accent was very different from Belgrade standard. Captio AI captured it perfectly — I didn't miss anything important."

Marko V. 🇷🇸
marko.v***@gmail.com
Novi Sad, progressive hearing loss

"The four pitch accents in Serbian are completely invisible on the lips. Captio AI distinguishes them every time — words I used to confuse constantly now come through correctly."

Jelena P. 🇷🇸
jelena.p***@gmail.com
Beograd, moderate bilateral loss

"Restaurants in Niš are loud and everyone talks fast. I put my phone on the table and read the conversation in real time. Going out with friends is completely different now."

Stefan K. 🇷🇸
stefan.k***@gmail.com
Niš, profound loss since childhood

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Serbian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store