Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Azerbaijani live captions and productivity tool for traveling

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

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Captio AI app showing live captions

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

✈️Airports and boarding

Departures at Heydar Aliyev International (GYD) are announced in Azerbaijani, Russian, and English. Captio AI captions all three languages so you catch gate numbers and boarding times without missing a departure.

🚂Train stations and public transport

Azerbaijani Railways (ADY) trains announce stops in Azerbaijani between Baku, Ganja, and Nakhchivan. At the Baku train station, Captio AI captions the ticket window exchange and platform PA in real time.

🏨Hotels and check-in

A hotel receptionist in Baku's Old City or in Sheki explaining check-in details and local tips in Azerbaijani. Place Captio AI on the desk and follow the full conversation without asking for anything repeated.

🗺️Navigating and asking for help

Asking for directions near Icherisheher (Old City) in Baku or navigating the Baku Metro. Fast conversational Azerbaijani from locals — Captio AI captions their reply so you find your way on the first attempt.

🛃Customs and immigration

Azerbaijani border control officers at Heydar Aliyev International or land crossings into Georgia or Turkey speak quickly in formal Azerbaijani. Captio AI captions every question so you respond accurately.

🎭Tours and activities

A guide at the Flame Towers observation point, Gobustan National Park with its rock art, or Sheki Khan's Palace delivering Azerbaijani commentary on Caucasian and Silk Road history. Captio AI captions in real time.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Azerbaijani
92.1%

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 a world that announces everything by sound

Captions any spoken exchange in real time

Airport staff, hotel receptionists, taxi drivers, tour guides. Hold the phone toward whoever is speaking and read the captions — in any setting, in any country.

60+ languages — no language barrier

Live Translator captions and translates in real time. They speak their language — you read in yours. For every country, every language, no manual setup between interactions.

Works anywhere with a data connection

Wi-Fi or mobile data. A local SIM or roaming plan keeps Captio AI running in any country — airports, hotels, rural areas, and everywhere in between.

Handles travel environments

Noisy airports, busy stations, echoing hotel lobbies. Captio AI is built for real environments — not quiet controlled rooms. It captions through the ambient noise of travel.

Discreet in any public setting

Hold the phone or place it near the speaker. Captio AI runs quietly and draws no attention — useful in customs, immigration, and any formal travel interaction where discretion matters.

Private by default

Travel conversations — customs declarations, hotel bookings, personal exchanges — are never stored or shared. Audio is processed in real time and discarded immediately.

Azerbaijani

Why Azerbaijani is hard to understand

Uvular and velar consonants

  • Azerbaijani's back consonants /q/, /x/, /ğ/ are produced deep in the throat
  • Azerbaijani has uvular stop /q/, velar fricative /x/, and uvular fricative /ğ/ — all produced at the back of the oral cavity or in the throat, with no corresponding lip or jaw movement visible from the front. At Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Baku, an agent at the check-in counter or an immigration officer uses these consonants in standard travel vocabulary. A deaf traveler watching their face sees nothing that maps to these phonemes.

Vowel harmony across suffixes

  • Agglutinative suffix chains shift vowels — the shifts are subtle on the lips
  • Azerbaijani is agglutinative with strict vowel harmony: suffixes change their vowel to harmonize with the stem. A ticket enquiry at Baku's train station or a hotel booking question involves chains of harmonically shifted suffixes where front/back vowel distinctions (/e/ vs /a/, /ø/ vs /o/, /y/ vs /u/) differ minimally in lip position. A deaf traveler watches a long word arrive and cannot track the vowel harmony distinctions that carry grammatical meaning.

North-South Azerbaijani divide

  • Republic of Azerbaijan Azerbaijani and Iranian Azerbaijani are phonologically different
  • Northern Azerbaijani — spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan and written in Latin script — differs from Southern Azerbaijani spoken in northwestern Iran (Tabriz, Ardabil) in phonology, stress, and lexical inventory. A deaf traveler who prepared for Baku Azerbaijani travels through Tabriz or the Azerbaijani-speaking communities of northern Iran and encounters a different prosodic system at every hotel counter and checkpoint.

Azerbaijani-Russian code-switching in Baku

  • Russian is widely used alongside Azerbaijani in Baku — switching arrives mid-sentence
  • In Baku and northern Azerbaijan, Russian remains widely spoken alongside Azerbaijani, especially among older populations and in formal service contexts. At a Baku hotel, a taxi, or a travel agent, a staff member may switch from Azerbaijani to Russian mid-sentence without any visual signal. A deaf traveler calibrated to Azerbaijani suddenly encounters Russian phonology — a different consonant and vowel system — with no preparation.

Fast speech vowel reduction

  • Unstressed vowels reduce in natural Azerbaijani conversation
  • In natural fast Azerbaijani speech — at the Baku Metro, the Icheri Sheher (Old City) market, or a bus terminal in Ganja — unstressed vowels reduce toward schwa or delete. A deaf traveler's preparation from slower, clearer Azerbaijani resources doesn't predict the reduced forms that arrive at real-world travel counters in Azerbaijan.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss and travel accessibility in Azerbaijan

Approximately 624,000 people in Azerbaijan — around 6.4% of the population — live with some form of disability, with sensory impairment (including hearing loss) among the most common categories. Azerbaijan does not publish comprehensive national hearing loss prevalence statistics as a distinct category, but the GBD 2019 global burden study estimated that 1.57 billion people worldwide had hearing loss in 2019 — equivalent to one in five of the global population — with the Eastern European and Central Asian region carrying a prevalence rate higher than Western Europe by a factor of 1.35. Against Azerbaijan's population of approximately 10 million, regional burden estimates suggest several hundred thousand Azerbaijanis navigating daily life with hearing loss.

Azerbaijan's travel infrastructure — including Heydar Aliyev International Airport, the Baku Metro (opened in 1967 and serving 22 stations), Azerbaijan Railways' intercity network, and the Baku-Tbilisi rail link — communicates travel information primarily through spoken Azerbaijani and Russian PA announcements. Real-time captioning of travel infrastructure is not a standard feature. For deaf and hard of hearing Azerbaijanis or international visitors to Azerbaijan, the Old City (Icherisheher), the Gobustan National Park, and the Sheki Khan's Palace are all sites where guided tours are conducted verbally — without captioning or text-based communication alternatives.

Captio AI captions Azerbaijani in real time — whether a departure announcement at Heydar Aliyev International, an immigration officer at the Azerbaijan-Georgia border, or a guide at Gobustan — so a deaf traveler in Azerbaijan follows every instruction and question without depending on audio infrastructure built without them in mind.

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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

"Immigration at Heydar Aliyev Airport speaks fast formal Azerbaijani. I had Captio AI open and every question appeared on screen. I answered correctly the first time — no asking for repeats, no confusion at the booth."

Elnur H. 🇦🇿
elnur.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku — business traveler

"ADY train announcements between Baku and Ganja come in fast Azerbaijani over a bad PA. I held Captio AI toward the speaker and the station name and arrival time appeared on screen. I stopped missing my stop."

Nargiz A. 🇦🇿
nargiz.a***@gmail.com
Deaf, Ganja — domestic traveler

"The guide at Sheki Khan's Palace switched between Azerbaijani and Russian throughout the tour. Captio AI captioned both. I followed the entire history of the Sheki Khanate without asking anyone to slow down."

Farid M. 🇦🇿
farid.m***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Sheki — tourist

"The Baku Metro announces stations in Azerbaijani. I pointed Captio AI at the carriage speaker and the station name appeared before the doors opened. I've stopped counting stops and started reading captions."

Leyla K. 🇦🇿
leyla.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku — regular Metro commuter

"Immigration at Heydar Aliyev Airport speaks fast formal Azerbaijani. I had Captio AI open and every question appeared on screen. I answered correctly the first time — no asking for repeats, no confusion at the booth."

Elnur H. 🇦🇿
elnur.h***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku — business traveler

"ADY train announcements between Baku and Ganja come in fast Azerbaijani over a bad PA. I held Captio AI toward the speaker and the station name and arrival time appeared on screen. I stopped missing my stop."

Nargiz A. 🇦🇿
nargiz.a***@gmail.com
Deaf, Ganja — domestic traveler

"The guide at Sheki Khan's Palace switched between Azerbaijani and Russian throughout the tour. Captio AI captioned both. I followed the entire history of the Sheki Khanate without asking anyone to slow down."

Farid M. 🇦🇿
farid.m***@gmail.com
Severely deaf, Sheki — tourist

"The Baku Metro announces stations in Azerbaijani. I pointed Captio AI at the carriage speaker and the station name appeared before the doors opened. I've stopped counting stops and started reading captions."

Leyla K. 🇦🇿
leyla.k***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Baku — regular Metro commuter

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Navigate confidently in Azerbaijani.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store