Ukrainian 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 Ukrainian restaurants & cafes
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Ukrainian 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 Ukraine — shared borscht, varenyky, and holubtsi — is a warm, talkative occasion where Ukrainian conversation runs from the first dish to the last. A hard of hearing person at a Ukrainian family table needs real-time captions.
Business lunches in Kyiv or Lviv are part of Ukrainian professional culture. Side comments and asides — said quietly over food — often carry the most substantive meaning.
A quick coffee stop at a Kyiv café or a varenyky lunch at a local stolovaya is a daily urban ritual. Fast orders and conversation in rapid Ukrainian add noise on top of linguistic complexity.
Travelling and eating out across Ukraine — from a Lviv café with its Austro-Hungarian heritage to an Odesa seaside restaurant — means navigating western and eastern Ukrainian accents. Captio AI captions whatever is spoken.
Group celebrations in Ukraine — weddings, namedays, and holiday meals — are loud, long, and involve overlapping Ukrainian at a large family table. Following without captioning means catching only fragments.
A one-on-one dinner at a quieter Kyiv restaurant carries the expectation of sustained Ukrainian conversation. Missing a sentence — especially a palatal distinction that changes 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 Ukrainian is hard to understand
Palatal consonant pairs
- Soft and hard consonants look identical
- Ukrainian distinguishes palatalised (soft) from plain (hard) consonants across much of its inventory — a contrast produced by the middle of the tongue rising toward the hard palate, deep inside the mouth and invisible from outside. In fast restaurant speech, these soft/hard pairs carry meaning throughout everyday Ukrainian food vocabulary and social speech.
Distinctive /ɦ/ vs /g/
- Ukrainian fricative vs hard velar — the key distinction from Russian
- Ukrainian uses a voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/ where Russian uses a hard voiced velar stop /g/. This difference — entirely in the back of the throat — creates a fundamental contrast between Ukrainian and Russian in shared vocabulary. A hard of hearing person who learned to lip-read Ukrainian through Russian approximations is reading the wrong consonant in hundreds of common words.
Final devoicing
- Voiced/voiceless pairs collapse at word ends
- Ukrainian devoices final obstruents in fast speech. Voiced consonants /b d g v z dz/ become their voiceless counterparts at the end of words — creating additional homophones in exactly the position (word-final) where a lip-reader has the least information anyway.
Fast casual Ukrainian
- Natural spoken Ukrainian compresses significantly
- Spoken Ukrainian at a restaurant table — especially in informal settings in Kyiv, Lviv, or Odesa — is substantially faster and more reduced than formal or broadcast Ukrainian. Vowel reduction, syllable compression, and rapid prosody together make natural Ukrainian at a dinner table significantly harder to follow than careful speech.
Ukrainian-Russian mixing
- Some urban areas historically blend both languages
- In parts of Ukraine — particularly Kharkiv, Odesa, and Dnipro — Ukrainian and Russian have historically blended in spoken surzhyk. A deaf or hard of hearing person expecting pure Ukrainian phonology may encounter a mixed phonological system mid-conversation at a restaurant table.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss in Ukraine: the cost of silent tables
Ukraine's 2014 disability survey recorded 2.7 million people — approximately 6% of the population — living with some form of disability. Research and advocacy reports note that Ukraine has historically been described as 'disability unfriendly', with only 4% of Kyiv's infrastructure rated as accessible. Deaf and hard of hearing Ukrainians face a physical and social environment where accessibility accommodations remain inconsistent, and the noisy settings of restaurant culture compound the communication barriers they face daily.
The context of conflict since 2022 has further disrupted support services and displaced large numbers of people, including many deaf and hard of hearing individuals, to other countries. Ukrainian Sign Language (USL) interpreters and deaf community organisations have worked to maintain services under extraordinary conditions. For Ukrainians with hearing loss living in Ukraine or abroad, communication in noisy social settings — restaurants, cafés, public dining — remains one of the hardest daily challenges.
Captio AI captions Ukrainian conversation in real time — whether a friend explains a dish at a Lviv café table in fast western Ukrainian, or family members overlap each other at a birthday meal in Kyiv.
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
"Ukrainian palatal consonants are everything — the difference between soft and hard changes the word completely. I could never lip-read them. Captio shows me the exact text and I finally read what people actually said."
"Lviv restaurants have a particular western Ukrainian accent that I love. With hearing loss I was always struggling to follow it. Captio handles the Lviv variety accurately and I'm back in the conversation."
"I moved to Germany in 2022 and now I meet other Ukrainians at community gatherings. Fast Ukrainian in a noisy Berlin café was incredibly hard to follow. Captio works anywhere in the world."
"Odesa speech mixes Ukrainian and Russian and I was never sure which consonant system I was reading. Captio cuts through the ambiguity and gives me clean text of what was actually said."
"Ukrainian palatal consonants are everything — the difference between soft and hard changes the word completely. I could never lip-read them. Captio shows me the exact text and I finally read what people actually said."
"Lviv restaurants have a particular western Ukrainian accent that I love. With hearing loss I was always struggling to follow it. Captio handles the Lviv variety accurately and I'm back in the conversation."
"I moved to Germany in 2022 and now I meet other Ukrainians at community gatherings. Fast Ukrainian in a noisy Berlin café was incredibly hard to follow. Captio works anywhere in the world."
"Odesa speech mixes Ukrainian and Russian and I was never sure which consonant system I was reading. Captio cuts through the ambiguity and gives me clean text of what was actually said."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Have a real conversation through the noise in Ukrainian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store