Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Slovak 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

Dinner with friends at a traditional Slovak reštaurácia or wine cellar in Bratislava or Košice, where the conversation flows fast over halušky and Slovak wine and the noise of a lively table fills the room.

💼Business lunches

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

Cafe catch-ups

Café catch-ups at a Bratislava café or a Slovak coffee bar, where the ambient noise and nearby conversations compete with the person sitting across from you.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Eating out in Slovakia as a visitor, where Slovak menus and fast server explanations are hard to follow and knowing what you are ordering from traditional Slovak cuisine matters.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

Family celebrations at a Slovak restaurant — name days, birthdays, Christmas dinners — where multiple conversations happen at once and the warmth of a full family table fills the room.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

Dates at a Bratislava Old Town restaurant or a Košice city-centre café where you want to follow every word without asking your partner to repeat themselves.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Slovak
91.5%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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.

Slovak

Why Slovak is hard to understand

Phonemic vowel length

  • Long vs. short vowels change meaning — with nothing to see
  • Standard Slovak distinguishes short and long vowels phonemically — a short /a/ and a long /á/ are completely different words. These length distinctions are invisible on the lips and are also difficult to perceive in fast speech even for hearing people. At a Bratislava restaurant table, common minimal pairs blur together with no visual cue to distinguish them.

Syllabic consonants /l̩/ and /r̩/

  • Words with no conventional vowels at all
  • Slovak uses syllabic /l/ and /r/ as vowel-like consonants in words like vlk (wolf) and krk (throat) — words that contain no conventional vowels. These sounds are produced with a consonantal articulation that carries minimal lip information. At a Slovak restaurant table, these common words arrive with no visible vowel to anchor the lip pattern.

Western-Central-Eastern dialect divide

  • Bratislava, Banská Bystrica, and Košice Slovak each sound different
  • Slovak has three main dialect groups: Western, Central, and Eastern. Eastern Slovak dialects have penultimate stress rather than the initial stress of Standard Slovak, and lack the phonemic vowel length distinction entirely. A deaf person accustomed to Bratislava Slovak faces a genuinely different phonological system at a restaurant in Košice or Prešov.

Slovak-Czech mixing

  • Czech words arrive naturally in border regions and media contexts
  • Czech and Slovak are closely related and mutually intelligible. In border regions, media contexts, and among speakers who consume Czech content, Czech words enter Slovak conversation naturally. At a Bratislava restaurant, a Slovak-Czech mixed table requires the deaf diner to navigate two similar but phonologically distinct systems.

Fast Bratislava casual speech

  • Restaurant Slovak is much faster than textbook Slovak
  • Casual Bratislava restaurant conversation features significantly reduced unstressed syllables and faster delivery than formal or careful Slovak. The gap between slow Slovak and the rapid speech of a Friday evening dinner in Staré Mesto is large — removing the pauses and clear articulations that lip-reading depends on.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
The Challenge

Hearing loss in Slovakia: legal frameworks and daily accessibility gaps

Slovakia's disability policy framework emphasizes anti-discrimination law, prevention, accessibility measures, rehabilitation, and individual support, with the rights of persons with disabilities protected by law and enforceable through courts. Slovak Sign Language is recognized, and the Slovak Union of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing represents the interests of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Despite this framework, everyday settings — restaurants, cafés, social dining — operate without captioning infrastructure or mandatory interpreter provision. Globally, the GBD 2019 study estimated 1.57 billion people living with hearing loss (PMC7960691).

Research on hearing loss across Central Europe has documented that stigma, socio-cultural differences, and accessibility barriers compound the daily experience of hearing loss — even in countries with legal frameworks in place (PMC12101339, Audiology Research 2025). For deaf Slovaks, this means that a Friday evening at a Bratislava reštaurácia, a business lunch in Košice, or a family name-day dinner requires navigation strategies that hearing people never need. The restaurant sector has no obligation to provide captioning or real-time communication support.

Captio AI captions Slovak conversation in real time — at a Bratislava restaurant, a Košice café, or a family dinner table anywhere in Slovakia — so a deaf person can follow every exchange without needing an interpreter.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

Download on theApp Store
Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Family name-day dinner at a Bratislava wine cellar — eight relatives talking at once in fast Slovak. Captio AI followed every word. First celebration where I understood every plan being made."

Zuzana K. 🇸🇰
zuzana.k***@gmail.com
Bratislava, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Košice where my client spoke Eastern Slovak — completely different stress from Bratislava. Captio AI handled it perfectly. I didn't miss a single point."

Maroš V. 🇸🇰
maros.v***@gmail.com
Košice, moderate progressive loss

"Vlk, krk — Slovak words with no vowels that look like nothing on the lips. Captio AI transcribes them correctly every time. I still find it hard to believe."

Jana H. 🇸🇰
jana.h***@gmail.com
Banská Bystrica, profound bilateral loss

"Friday evening at a Bratislava Old Town restaurant — fast, loud, everyone talking at once. I put my phone on the table and followed the whole conversation for the first time in years."

Tomáš B. 🇸🇰
tomas.b***@gmail.com
Bratislava, hearing loss since 40s

"Family name-day dinner at a Bratislava wine cellar — eight relatives talking at once in fast Slovak. Captio AI followed every word. First celebration where I understood every plan being made."

Zuzana K. 🇸🇰
zuzana.k***@gmail.com
Bratislava, bilateral sensorineural loss

"Business lunch in Košice where my client spoke Eastern Slovak — completely different stress from Bratislava. Captio AI handled it perfectly. I didn't miss a single point."

Maroš V. 🇸🇰
maros.v***@gmail.com
Košice, moderate progressive loss

"Vlk, krk — Slovak words with no vowels that look like nothing on the lips. Captio AI transcribes them correctly every time. I still find it hard to believe."

Jana H. 🇸🇰
jana.h***@gmail.com
Banská Bystrica, profound bilateral loss

"Friday evening at a Bratislava Old Town restaurant — fast, loud, everyone talking at once. I put my phone on the table and followed the whole conversation for the first time in years."

Tomáš B. 🇸🇰
tomas.b***@gmail.com
Bratislava, hearing loss since 40s

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Slovak.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store