Ukrainian live captions and productivity tool for traveling
For deaf and hard of hearing people.
coming soon
Download for free
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Everything you need to follow Ukrainian traveling
Four tools built for deaf and hard of hearing Ukrainian 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.
Departures at Boryspil International (KBP) or Lviv International (LWO) are announced in Ukrainian. Captio AI captions every boarding call and gate change so you catch exact gate numbers and timing without relying on PA audio.
Ukrzaliznytsya intercity trains announce stops and connections in Ukrainian. At Kyiv Pasazhyrskyi or Lviv railway station, Captio AI captions the ticket window exchange and platform PA in real time.
A hotel receptionist in Lviv or Kyiv explaining room details, breakfast schedule, and local tips in Ukrainian. Place Captio AI on the desk and follow the full check-in conversation without asking for repeats.
Asking for directions near Lviv's Market Square or navigating Kyiv's Metro system. Fast Ukrainian from locals and service staff — Captio AI captions their reply so you find your way on the first try.
Ukrainian border control and customs officers at Boryspil or land crossings at Medyka or Uzhhorod speak quickly in formal Ukrainian. Captio AI captions every question so you respond accurately and confidently.
A guide at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, Lviv Old Town, or Chornobyl Exclusion Zone delivering Ukrainian commentary on history and architecture. 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 Ukrainian is hard to understand
Palatalization pairs
- Soft and hard consonants differ only by a palatal glide — invisible from the front
- Ukrainian has palatalized (soft) and non-palatalized (hard) pairs for most consonants. The soft variant is produced with an additional palatal articulation — a secondary constriction at the palate — that is completely invisible from face-to-face communication. At Lviv airport check-in or a train station counter at Kyiv Pasazhyrskyi, a soft vs hard consonant distinction that changes word meaning entirely produces no visible difference on the speaker's face.
Voiced fricative /ɦ/
- Ukrainian's distinctive /ɦ/ has no visible lip or jaw movement
- Standard Ukrainian uses a voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/ — not the hard /ɡ/ stop found in Russian — in many common words. This sound is produced at the glottis with no lip, tooth, or jaw movement. For a deaf traveler, Ukrainian words beginning with /ɦ/ look as if they begin with a vowel: the initial consonant is acoustically present but visually absent. Hotel staff in Lviv or Chernivtsi using standard Ukrainian give no visual signal for this phoneme.
Surzhyk and eastern dialect
- Eastern Ukrainian mixes Ukrainian and Russian mid-sentence without visual warning
- Eastern Ukrainian speech — heard in Dnipro, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia — blends Ukrainian and Russian words in patterns called surzhyk. A deaf traveler calibrated to standard western Ukrainian (Lviv) arrives in Dnipro to find speech where the underlying language switches mid-sentence. From the speaker's face, Slavic consonants look similar across Ukrainian and Russian, giving no phonological signal that the language of the sentence has just changed.
Vowel reduction under stress
- Unstressed vowels reduce significantly in fast connected speech
- Ukrainian vowels are affected by stress in complex ways: unstressed /o/ reduces toward /u/ or schwa, and unstressed /e/ reduces in certain environments. In natural connected speech at a train platform in Kyiv or a bus station in Ivano-Frankivsk, vowel reduction compresses the phonological form of words so that a deaf traveler's preparation based on citation forms does not match what appears on the speaker's lips.
Diaspora code-switching
- Ukrainian diaspora in Poland, Germany, and the UK switches between languages mid-sentence
- Large numbers of Ukrainians now live and travel through Poland, Germany, the UK, and Czech Republic. At Warsaw Chopin Airport, a Berlin bus station, or a London check-in desk, Ukrainian travelers speaking to each other code-switch into Polish or German mid-sentence. A deaf traveler reading Ukrainian lips must suddenly switch phoneme systems when the language changes — with no visual signal that it has.
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreHearing loss and travel accessibility in Ukraine
The WHO Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 estimated that 1.57 billion people globally live with hearing loss, representing 20.3% of the world's population — and European countries including Ukraine carry a substantial portion of that burden as populations age. The Joshua Project's community profile for the deaf population in Ukraine estimates a deaf community of significant size among Ukraine's pre-war population of approximately 44 million. Ukraine's National Sign Language (Ukrainian Sign Language, USL) is used by deaf Ukrainians, but interpreter provision in travel infrastructure — airports, railway stations, border crossings — has historically been limited.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine since February 2022 has created one of the largest displacement crises in Europe, with millions of Ukrainians traveling through Poland, Moldova, Romania, and other transit countries under urgent conditions. For deaf and hard of hearing Ukrainians in transit — at Polish border crossings, Warsaw bus stations, Berlin arrival centres, and refugee service counters — communication relies entirely on verbal interaction in a language that many Ukrainian travelers are not fluent in. The intersection of displacement stress and hearing loss creates communication barriers at every point of contact with transit and reception infrastructure.
Captio AI captions Ukrainian in real time — whether a gate announcement at Boryspil, an immigration officer at a European land border crossing, or a guide at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra — so a deaf traveler navigating Ukrainian-speaking environments follows every instruction and question 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
"At the Medyka border crossing, the Polish officer asked questions in Polish and the Ukrainian officer in Ukrainian. I had Captio AI open and it captioned both sides of the conversation. I crossed without anxiety for the first time."
"Platform announcements at Kyiv Pasazhyrskyi come in Ukrainian over a noisy hall PA. I held Captio AI toward the nearest speaker. The track number and platform change appeared on screen. I found the right train."
"Eastern Ukrainian around Kharkiv mixes Ukrainian and Russian constantly. Most tools fail me completely there. Captio AI captioned the station agent's surzhyk accurately — departure time and seat class, no mistakes."
"The guide at Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra spoke standard Ukrainian at full speed. I followed the whole tour with Captio AI — the history of each cave church, the mosaics, the names of the monks buried there."
"At the Medyka border crossing, the Polish officer asked questions in Polish and the Ukrainian officer in Ukrainian. I had Captio AI open and it captioned both sides of the conversation. I crossed without anxiety for the first time."
"Platform announcements at Kyiv Pasazhyrskyi come in Ukrainian over a noisy hall PA. I held Captio AI toward the nearest speaker. The track number and platform change appeared on screen. I found the right train."
"Eastern Ukrainian around Kharkiv mixes Ukrainian and Russian constantly. Most tools fail me completely there. Captio AI captioned the station agent's surzhyk accurately — departure time and seat class, no mistakes."
"The guide at Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra spoke standard Ukrainian at full speed. I followed the whole tour with Captio AI — the history of each cave church, the mosaics, the names of the monks buried there."
Download for free
Download on theApp StoreFrequently asked questions
Navigate confidently in Ukrainian.
Captio AI is free to start
coming soon
Download for free
Download on theApp Store