Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Romanian 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

TVR, Pro TV, and Antena 1 run live news that pre-generated captions can lag behind. Point Captio AI at your TV and read the Romanian as it is spoken, not several seconds behind the anchor.

🎬Streaming content

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

📱YouTube and social media

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

🌍Foreign-language content

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

🎭Cinema

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

🎧Podcasts and audio content

Most Romanian 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

Romanian
95.6%

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.

Romanian

Why Romanian is hard to understand

The central vowel î

  • A vowel with no equivalent and no clear lip shape
  • Romanian has a distinctive high central vowel written î or â, made with the tongue central and the lips neutral. It has no equivalent in most languages and gives a lip-reader almost nothing to see, yet it appears in common words and changes their meaning on screen.

ș and ț

  • The sh and ts sounds that look like s
  • Romanian contrasts s, ș (sh), and the affricate ț (ts). On the lips, ț looks much like a plain s, and on a fast drama or a news read the fine distinction is easily lost — yet it separates different words.

Vowel centralization

  • Unstressed vowels drift toward a neutral sound
  • In unstressed Romanian syllables, e and o centralise toward a schwa. Words look different from their written form, and at broadcast pace the drifting vowels give a deaf viewer little to segment a word by on screen.

Regional dialects on screen

  • Moldavian and Transylvanian speech differ
  • Romanian content features Bucharest speech, Moldavian, and Transylvanian varieties, which differ in vowels. A deaf viewer calibrated to standard Romanian meets shifting speech from one show or region to the next.

Romanian–English code-switching

  • English dropped into Romanian content
  • Romanian TV, film, and especially online content drop English terms into Romanian sentences. A deaf viewer meets English phonology on the key word, then returns to Romanian, with no visual warning and no lip to read after a cut.

Download for free

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The Challenge

Romania subtitles foreign content — but rarely captions for deaf viewers

Congenital hearing loss is relatively common in Romania, reported at between one and three per thousand newborns, and against a European backdrop in which around one in five people has some hearing loss, the burden across the country is substantial. Romania is unusual in its region for subtitling rather than dubbing foreign content — which helps — but that is not the same as captioning for deaf viewers.

Subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, which marks who is speaking and describes sounds, remains rare: dedicated SDH is only occasionally used, on a handful of programmes, and is described by researchers as an emerging rather than established standard. Live news carries no reliable real-time captions, the intralingual captions that would help a deaf Romanian viewer follow Romanian-language content are sparse, and streaming and social content vary widely.

Captio AI does not depend on the broadcaster or the platform. Point the phone at any screen — a live Pro TV bulletin, a Romanian drama, a YouTube clip — and read Romanian captions in real time from the audio, whether or not that content was ever captioned for deaf viewers.

Download for free

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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

"Foreign films are subtitled, which helps, but Romanian shows almost never have captions for us. Captio AI captions the Romanian dialogue from the audio, in real time. I follow local content for the first time."

Andrei P. 🇷🇴
andrei.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Cluj-Napoca — streaming viewer

"Live news has no reliable captions and the central î vowel is invisible on the lips. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. I read the news as it is read."

Elena D. 🇷🇴
elena.d***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bucharest — live news viewer

"Moldavian speech is different from Bucharest Romanian and the ț sound looks like s to me. Captio AI captions the dialogue from the audio, whatever the accent. I follow the whole show now."

Mihai R. 🇷🇴
mihai.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Iași — drama viewer

"Romanian YouTube mixes in English and the auto-captions are unreliable. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Ioana M. 🇷🇴
ioana.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bucharest — YouTube viewer

"Foreign films are subtitled, which helps, but Romanian shows almost never have captions for us. Captio AI captions the Romanian dialogue from the audio, in real time. I follow local content for the first time."

Andrei P. 🇷🇴
andrei.p***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Cluj-Napoca — streaming viewer

"Live news has no reliable captions and the central î vowel is invisible on the lips. Captio AI captions it in real time from the audio. I read the news as it is read."

Elena D. 🇷🇴
elena.d***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bucharest — live news viewer

"Moldavian speech is different from Bucharest Romanian and the ț sound looks like s to me. Captio AI captions the dialogue from the audio, whatever the accent. I follow the whole show now."

Mihai R. 🇷🇴
mihai.r***@gmail.com
Hard of hearing, Iași — drama viewer

"Romanian YouTube mixes in English and the auto-captions are unreliable. Captio AI captions any clip accurately from the audio. It covers exactly the content the platforms do not."

Ioana M. 🇷🇴
ioana.m***@gmail.com
Deaf, Bucharest — YouTube viewer

Download for free

Download on theApp Store
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Watch anything in Romanian.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

Download on theApp Store