Polish 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 Polish traveling
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Polish 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.
Gate changes and boarding calls at Warsaw Chopin (WAW) or Kraków John Paul II International (KRK) come in fast Polish. Captio AI captions every PA announcement and ground agent exchange so you catch gate numbers and boarding times.
PKP Intercity trains announce stops in Polish over onboard PA. At Warsaw Centralna or Kraków Główny ticket windows, Captio AI captions the exchange so you know your platform, track, and departure time.
A hotel receptionist in Warsaw, Kraków, or Gdańsk explaining check-in details and local tips in Polish. Place Captio AI on the desk and follow the full conversation without asking for anything repeated.
Asking for directions near the Warsaw Old Town or navigating Kraków's tram network on foot. Fast Polish from locals and service staff — Captio AI captions their reply so you find your way without confusion.
Polish border control and customs at Warsaw Chopin or Kraków airport — officers speak quickly in formal Polish. Captio AI captions every question so you respond accurately and confidently.
A guide at Wawel Castle in Kraków, the Wieliczka Salt Mine, or the Warsaw Rising Museum delivering Polish commentary on modern and medieval history. Captio AI captions in real time so you follow every detail.
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 Polish is hard to understand
Consonant cluster density
- Polish allows up to four consonants at the start of a word — all in rapid succession
- Polish permits initial consonant clusters of extreme length — wstrząs, strzał, chrząszcz. At Warsaw Chopin Airport or Kraków Główny train station, a departure announcement or gate instruction delivers these clusters at normal speech rate, and the lip and jaw movements blur into rapid undifferentiated motion. A deaf traveler who has practiced slower Polish receives a consonant stream at the counter that provides almost no visual anchor point.
Three sibilant series
- Polish has three parallel sets of hissing sounds — all looking identical on the lips
- Polish distinguishes three sets of sibilants: alveolar (s, z, c, dz), retroflex (sz, ż, cz, dż), and palato-alveolar/palatal (ś, ź, ć, dź). All three series produce similar lip rounding visible from the outside — the distinctions are made at the tongue tip, alveolar ridge, or palate. At Gdańsk Airport or on a PKP Intercity train, a station announcement uses all three sets; a deaf traveler sees one visually undifferentiated category where Polish phonology has three.
Nasal vowels
- Polish ą and ę carry meaning — nasalization is produced inside, not on the lips
- Polish has two phonemic nasal vowels, ą and ę, that contrast with their oral counterparts. Nasalization is a resonance property of the nasal cavity — not associated with any change in lip shape or jaw position. A hotel receptionist in Warsaw explaining payment details or a station agent in Wrocław giving platform information uses nasal vowels whose phonemic status a deaf traveler cannot recover from lip-reading.
Regional accent variation
- Warsaw, Kraków, and Silesia have noticeably different vowel systems
- Polish dialects vary across regions. Warsaw speech (Mazovian) differs from Kraków speech (Lesser Polish) in vowel quality, and Silesian-influenced Polish from Wrocław and Katowice differs from both. A deaf traveler calibrated to Warsaw standard Polish arrives in Wrocław to find Silesian-influenced vowel shifts and slightly different consonant articulations at hotel desks and ticket windows.
Polish-English code-switching in tourist cities
- Younger Polish hotel and tour staff switch into English mid-sentence
- Urban Polish in Warsaw, Kraków, and Gdańsk — particularly among younger hotel receptionists and tour guides — switches into English mid-sentence. The switch arrives without visual announcement: a deaf traveler reading lips for Polish must suddenly apply English phoneme-to-viseme mapping without any transition signal. The language boundaries in natural bilingual Polish-English speech are phonologically invisible.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss and travel accessibility in Poland
Hearing loss in Poland is significantly more prevalent among men (22.3%) than women, and rises steeply with age — from 15.4% among people in their 60s to 58.2% among people aged over 70, according to a 2025 cohort study published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. A separate screening study of first-grade children in rural Małopolskie found that 11.6% of children had hearing loss, indicating that hearing impairment is not limited to the elderly and affects a substantial proportion of school-age children in rural regions. Against a national population of 38 million, these figures translate to millions of Poles navigating daily life with hearing loss — including millions who travel domestically and internationally.
Poland's travel infrastructure — Warsaw Chopin Airport, PKP Intercity's extensive rail network covering 250 cities, and tram and bus networks in Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, and Gdańsk — communicates critical information primarily through spoken Polish announcements with no standard real-time captioning for passengers. Kraków's historic sites draw over 10 million tourists per year, many of whom participate in Polish-language guided tours at Wawel Castle, the Wieliczka Salt Mine, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial — tours that are conducted verbally with no captioning alternative. For a deaf or hard of hearing traveler in Poland, oral-only information delivery at every point in the travel journey creates cumulative barriers that hearing travelers never notice.
Captio AI captions Polish in real time — whether a PKP Intercity platform announcement, an immigration officer at Warsaw Chopin, or a guide at Wawel Castle — so a deaf traveler in Poland follows every instruction, question, and commentary without depending on audio 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
"PKP Intercity announces platform changes over a distorted PA at Warsaw Centralna and I've ended up on the wrong platform more than once. Captio AI pointed at the nearest speaker catches the announcement in real time. I haven't missed a train since."
"Hotel check-in in Kraków is always a fast Polish conversation with the receptionist. I used to rely on written notes. Now I hold Captio AI toward the desk and follow the whole thing — room details, breakfast times, local tips."
"Border control at Kraków airport speaks very fast formal Polish. I had Captio AI open and every question appeared on screen. I answered correctly without a second question from the officer."
"The guide at Wieliczka Salt Mine spoke Polish at full speed with a Silesian accent I wasn't used to. Captio AI captioned the entire tour — the history of each chamber, the carved chapels, the lake at the bottom. I didn't miss a word."
"PKP Intercity announces platform changes over a distorted PA at Warsaw Centralna and I've ended up on the wrong platform more than once. Captio AI pointed at the nearest speaker catches the announcement in real time. I haven't missed a train since."
"Hotel check-in in Kraków is always a fast Polish conversation with the receptionist. I used to rely on written notes. Now I hold Captio AI toward the desk and follow the whole thing — room details, breakfast times, local tips."
"Border control at Kraków airport speaks very fast formal Polish. I had Captio AI open and every question appeared on screen. I answered correctly without a second question from the officer."
"The guide at Wieliczka Salt Mine spoke Polish at full speed with a Silesian accent I wasn't used to. Captio AI captioned the entire tour — the history of each chamber, the carved chapels, the lake at the bottom. I didn't miss a word."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Navigate confidently in Polish.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store