Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Bulgarian live captions and productivity tool for tv & media

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Use Cases

Every situation covered

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

📺Live TV — news, sport, events

BNT, bTV, and Nova run live news that pre-generated captions lag behind. Point Captio AI at your TV and read the Bulgarian as it is spoken, not several seconds behind the anchor.

🎬Streaming content

Voyo and other platforms vary in subtitle quality and availability. Captio AI works as a consistent fallback for any Bulgarian show or film that ships with wrong, delayed, or missing captions.

📱YouTube and social media

YouTube auto-captions for Bulgarian are often inaccurate and most social video has none. Point Captio AI at your phone and read accurate Bulgarian captions for any clip.

🌍Foreign-language content

A foreign film voiced over in Bulgarian, a foreign documentary, a non-Bulgarian channel. Live Translator captions and translates in real time so anything becomes watchable as it plays.

🎭Cinema

Not every cinema showing is captioned. Hold Captio AI near the audio and read real-time Bulgarian captions of the dialogue discreetly from your seat.

🎧Podcasts and audio content

Most Bulgarian podcasts have no transcript. Hold Captio AI near the audio or upload a recording, and read the whole episode in writing.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Bulgarian
94.4%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
Captio AI in everyday use
Why Captio AI

Built for the content that subtitles fail

Captions any content in real time

Point the phone toward any speaker — TV, laptop, tablet, cinema screen. Captio AI captions whatever is playing, regardless of whether that platform provides subtitles.

Faster than built-in subtitles for live content

Pre-generated subtitles lag behind live TV by several seconds. Captio AI captions in real time — so you read what is being said as it is being said.

Works on any screen or device

No integration required. Point the phone toward the audio source — the same approach works for a large TV, a laptop screen, a cinema, or a phone held at arm's length.

Any language, translated in real time

For foreign-language content, switch to Live Translator. It translates as content plays — so a French film, a German documentary, or a Japanese series all become watchable.

No subtitle file needed

Captio AI captions from the audio directly. No subtitle file, no platform support, no creator requirement. If audio plays, Captio AI can caption it.

More accurate than auto-generated captions

The industry average for AI-generated subtitles is a 10–15% word error rate — roughly 1 in 10 words wrong (3Play Media). Captio AI is built for accuracy in real-world audio conditions.

Bulgarian

Why Bulgarian is hard to understand

Vowel reduction

  • Unstressed vowels collapse toward a neutral sound
  • Bulgarian reduces unstressed vowels — a and ъ move toward a schwa, o toward u — strongest in fast colloquial speech. Words look different from their written form, so on a fast drama or a news read the flattened vowels give a deaf viewer little to segment a word by on screen.

Palatalization

  • Soft consonants with barely visible cues
  • Bulgarian contrasts plain and soft (palatalized) consonants, a distinction carried by a tongue-body gesture that is almost invisible from the front. On screen a deaf viewer sees the same mouth for a plain and a soft consonant that make different words.

East–west dialect split

  • Reduction and yat differ across the country
  • Eastern Bulgarian reduces unstressed vowels more heavily and treats the old yat vowel differently from the west. Content featuring speakers from different regions presents a deaf viewer with shifting vowels from one show to the next.

Mobile stress

  • Stress that jumps as words take affixes
  • Bulgarian stress is dynamic and free, and it shifts when prefixes and suffixes attach. A deaf viewer trying to anchor a word by its stressed syllable finds the anchor moves through a scene, with the stress carried in pitch, not on the lips.

Voice-over on foreign content

  • Foreign film narrated over the original, lips never match
  • Foreign film and TV are commonly voiced over into Bulgarian, so the words a viewer hears do not match the lips on screen. For a deaf viewer relying on lip-reading, this content is impossible to follow from the face alone.

Download for free

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The Challenge

Bulgarian screens are only beginning to caption for deaf viewers

Against a European backdrop in which around one in five people has some hearing loss, Bulgaria carries a substantial burden across its population; congenital permanent bilateral hearing loss is recorded at roughly 1.63 per thousand newborns, and comprehensive data on the deaf and hard of hearing population is thin. Dedicated subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing is only beginning to emerge as a media standard.

Most of what a deaf Bulgarian viewer watches goes uncaptioned in an accessible form. Live news carries no reliable real-time captions, foreign film and TV are commonly voiced over into Bulgarian — leaving a deaf lip-reader with a mouth that never matches the soundtrack — and streaming and social content vary widely. The vowel reduction and mobile stress that make Bulgarian hard to lip-read leave a deaf viewer stranded wherever a caption is missing.

Captio AI does not depend on the broadcaster or the platform. Point the phone at any screen — a live BNT bulletin, a voiced-over foreign film, a YouTube clip — and read Bulgarian captions in real time from the audio, whether or not that content was ever captioned.

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
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

"Foreign films get a Bulgarian voice-over, so the lips never match the sound — impossible for me. Captio AI captions the Bulgarian soundtrack from the audio. For the first time I can follow voiced-over content."

Georgi D. 🇧🇬
georgi.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Sofia — foreign-content viewer

"Bulgarian dramas rarely have captions for us, and the reduced vowels make words look nothing like they are written. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio. I follow the whole story now."

Ivana P. 🇧🇬
ivana.p***@gmail.com
Deaf, Plovdiv — drama viewer

"Live news has no reliable captions and eastern and western Bulgarian reduce the vowels differently. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. I read the news as it is read."

Nikolay T. 🇧🇬
nikolay.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Varna — live news viewer

"Bulgarian YouTube barely has captions and the auto-captions are unreliable. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Petya M. 🇧🇬
petya.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Sofia — YouTube viewer

"Foreign films get a Bulgarian voice-over, so the lips never match the sound — impossible for me. Captio AI captions the Bulgarian soundtrack from the audio. For the first time I can follow voiced-over content."

Georgi D. 🇧🇬
georgi.d***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Sofia — foreign-content viewer

"Bulgarian dramas rarely have captions for us, and the reduced vowels make words look nothing like they are written. Captio AI captions the actual dialogue from the audio. I follow the whole story now."

Ivana P. 🇧🇬
ivana.p***@gmail.com
Deaf, Plovdiv — drama viewer

"Live news has no reliable captions and eastern and western Bulgarian reduce the vowels differently. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. I read the news as it is read."

Nikolay T. 🇧🇬
nikolay.t***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Varna — live news viewer

"Bulgarian YouTube barely has captions and the auto-captions are unreliable. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Petya M. 🇧🇬
petya.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Sofia — YouTube viewer

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Watch anything in Bulgarian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store