Estonian live captions and productivity tool for traveling
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
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Everything you need to follow Estonian traveling
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Estonian speakers.
Captions any spoken exchange, anywhere
- Airport staff, hotel receptionists, taxi drivers
- Real time, word by word, as they speak
- Works through travel noise and accents
- No setup — open the app and point it
No language barrier, anywhere in the world
- They speak their language — you read in yours
- 60+ languages, no manual switching
- For customs, hotels, restaurants, and local transport
- Translates in real time as they speak
Transcribe any recorded content
- Record a tour guide, a briefing, an important exchange
- Upload and get the full transcript to review
- Any language, any format
- Useful for travel information you want in writing
Key travel information extracted
- Instructions, directions, and key details from any transcript
- Organised into clear sections
- Useful after complex hotel check-ins or guided briefings
- 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.
At Tallinn Airport (TLL), gate changes and boarding calls come in Estonian and English. Captio AI captions both languages so you catch every gate number and boarding time.
Elron trains and Tallinn's trams and buses announce stops in Estonian. Captio AI captions the ticket-counter exchange and the platform PA in real time so you board the right service.
A receptionist in Tallinn's Old Town or a guesthouse in Tartu explaining check-in, breakfast, and the way to the square in Estonian. Place Captio AI on the desk and follow every word.
Asking the way through Tallinn's medieval lanes or a village on Saaremaa. Fast Estonian from a local — Captio AI captions the reply so you find the route the first time.
Border and customs officers at Tallinn Airport and the Baltic ferry terminals speak quickly in formal Estonian. Captio AI captions every question so you respond accurately.
A guide at Tallinn's Old Town, the Seaplane Harbour museum, or Lahemaa National Park delivering Estonian commentary. Captio AI captions so you follow the full story.
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 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.
Why Estonian is hard to understand
Three-way length
- Short, long, and overlong — a distinction the lips barely show
- Estonian has three contrastive lengths for both vowels and consonants: short, long, and overlong. The difference between the long and overlong grades is a matter of fine timing spread across the syllable, not a change in mouth shape. Two words can look identical on the lips and mean different things purely because one sound is held a fraction longer — at a Tallinn ticket window, a deaf traveler has no visual way to tell them apart.
Nine vowels and vowel harmony traces
- A rich vowel system including the õ
- Estonian has nine vowel qualities, among them the distinctive õ, a sound with no equivalent in most European languages. Several of these vowels are close together and hard to separate on the lips, and each can appear in three lengths — multiplying the fine distinctions a lip-reader would have to catch and getting none of the timing information from the mouth.
Palatalization
- Softening that happens with almost no visible cue
- Estonian palatalization can distinguish words even without a following front vowel, and it is realised as a subtle tongue gesture before the consonant. It is optional and gradient in many words, so it varies from speaker to speaker — and a deaf traveler cannot see the difference between a palatalized and a plain consonant at a hotel desk.
Meaning on the endings
- Fourteen cases, all marked at the far end of the word
- Estonian grammar runs on fourteen cases, marked by endings at the end of the word — where you are going, coming from, or staying is all encoded there. In fast speech those final syllables weaken and clip, so the exact information a traveler needs about direction and destination is the part that fades on the lips.
Fast casual speech
- Relaxed Estonian drops and links
- In everyday speech Estonians clip endings, drop weak vowels, and run words together, especially in the quick exchanges of a busy terminal. The careful, evenly-timed pronunciation that would help a lip-reader disappears into a rapid, connected stream.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss and travel accessibility in Estonia
There are an estimated 43,500 deaf and hard of hearing people in Estonia — roughly 3.3% of the population — though researchers note that the lack of systematic study makes the figure hard to pin down against the WHO's estimate that around 5% of the world's population has disabling hearing loss. At the core of this community, about 1,500 people use Estonian Sign Language, served by only around 25 working interpreters, in a country of just 1.3 million. The Estonian Association of the Deaf has represented these citizens since 1922, but the interpreter shortage alone shows how thin professional support remains.
Estonia is celebrated for its digital public services, yet its travel infrastructure still leans on spoken audio. Tallinn Airport, the Elron rail network, the trams and buses of the capital, and the busy Baltic ferry terminals linking Tallinn to Helsinki and the Estonian islands all communicate through spoken Estonian announcements, with no standardised real-time captioning at gates, platforms, and counters. For a deaf traveler, a changed gate or a delayed ferry announced only over a PA system is information that everyone else received automatically.
Captio AI captions Estonian in real time — a boarding call at Tallinn Airport, an Elron platform announcement, a ferry-terminal call to Saaremaa, a guesthouse check-in in Tartu — so a deaf traveler in Estonia follows every change and question without depending on infrastructure built without them in mind.
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
"Tallinn Airport calls are fast Estonian and English, and the three-way length thing means words look the same on the mouth but mean different things. Captio AI captioned the gate change straight away. I read it and walked to the gate instead of guessing."
"Guesthouse hosts in Tartu talk quickly and the Estonian endings clip in casual speech, so I lose where I am meant to go. Captio AI captioned the whole check-in — the room, the key code, directions to the square — and I did not have to ask her to repeat once."
"The ferry to Saaremaa announces boarding and delays over the terminal PA in Estonian. I missed a sailing once because I could not catch the call. Now Captio AI captions the announcement the moment it plays and I board on time."
"The Old Town guide spoke quick Estonian about the medieval guilds and the town wall. I would have caught fragments. With Captio AI I followed the whole tour — the merchants, the towers, the Hanseatic history — every word on my screen."
"Tallinn Airport calls are fast Estonian and English, and the three-way length thing means words look the same on the mouth but mean different things. Captio AI captioned the gate change straight away. I read it and walked to the gate instead of guessing."
"Guesthouse hosts in Tartu talk quickly and the Estonian endings clip in casual speech, so I lose where I am meant to go. Captio AI captioned the whole check-in — the room, the key code, directions to the square — and I did not have to ask her to repeat once."
"The ferry to Saaremaa announces boarding and delays over the terminal PA in Estonian. I missed a sailing once because I could not catch the call. Now Captio AI captions the announcement the moment it plays and I board on time."
"The Old Town guide spoke quick Estonian about the medieval guilds and the town wall. I would have caught fragments. With Captio AI I followed the whole tour — the merchants, the towers, the Hanseatic history — every word on my screen."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Navigate confidently in Estonian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store