We make ordering 🇨🇳Chinese, 🇹🇼Taiwanese, 🇯🇵Japanese, 🇰🇷Korean, 🇭🇰Cantonese, 🇸🇬Singaporean, and 🇹🇭Thai food simple - helping you understand the menu, place orders, and communicate preferences. Available on web, iOS, and Android (coming soon).
It's well known that Menu, please! It was born out of the pain we felt while traveling in Asia, where we couldn't easily enter restaurants, food stalls, or bars without fearing we wouldn't be able to order confidently.
But did you know that the project was born as a final coding BootCamp project for an Ironhack Web Development course? And did you know it won the best web project award in a pitch competition? Here's the video!
Menu, please! Pitch Competition Video!
Have fun watching and thank you for all the support! Being able to work towards solving this problem and enabling those who love food to explore senses not ratings-first, is what keeps us working towards our goal and engaging with you every single day.
Krists & Chris
Thank you @ttiiffyyy for the 5✨! That's exactly our goal - you should use your fingers to select which dish and how much of it you want to eat directly in Menu, please! and not point all over the place!
Menu, please! makes ordering 🇨🇳 Chinese, 🇹🇼 Taiwanese, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇭🇰 Cantonese, 🇸🇬 Singaporean and 🇹🇭 Thai food simple. We help you understand the menu, place your order, and communicate your preferences with ease. With Menu, please!, you can order like a local from day one. And it's free!
Enter any restaurant with confidence. With just a single photo, you can instantly translate the entire menu, understand the ingredients and flavors of each dish, build your order directly in the app, and even communicate with staff using our live translation feature.
Key Features:
Instant Photo Interpretation: One photo is all it takes. Our AI intelligently reads the entire menu layout—including sections, sides, and tiny footnotes—so nothing gets lost in translation.
Go Beyond Words: Get more than just a name. For each dish, learn about the ingredients, flavor profile, and how locals typically enjoy it.
Effortless Ordering: Build your order in the app and show it as translated text or play it as audio for the staff. No more pointing, guessing, or awkward mime games.
Works Across Asia: Full support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Singaporean, and Thai menus.
What Our Users Are Saying:
"Really Impressive" - Olle Linge, Hacking Chinese
"Menu, please! is excellent. It reads the menu, converts it into an easy-to-read format with Japanese pronunciation, and you can specify how much you need... Can't recommend it enough!" - r/DexterousChunk
"Finde die Idee mega gut! Hab die letzten drei Monate in Japan verbracht und da haette es mir einiges an nervigem Google-Nonsens erspart." (Translation: "I think the idea is great! I spent the last three months in Japan and it would have saved me from some annoying Google nonsense.") - u/lydia-morphem
"This would have been a game-changer when I lived in Taiwan." - Brian Koetting
"Your app is so useful! It would have saved me so much time when I was living in Taiwan! I'll use it next time I go there. Thank you!" - babettmade
Download Menu, please! today and embrace the freedom to explore Asia's incredible culinary scene!
@busmark_w_nika Thank you! There's a whole bunch of them - wait till you meet the waiter dumpling! I hope they can be a great support team for your next food adventure.
@krists_from_menu_please When you say Chinese: does it handle the dialects? I mean understading the written text is one thing, but then speaking it out loud as an app is another. Either way is fine, just want to know how it works. Such a nice app, really appreciate someone making this!
@tadeus_syize Chinese dialects can be crazy, and I have only tried it in Shanghai & Taipei, but here's how it works ...
I wanted the speech translation to feel as responsive and be as flexible as possible, so the whole speaking part is handled by multiple Google Cloud services.
🎤 Step 1: The speech is sent to Google Gemini for translation, as it provides the most "human" response and is way faster than Google speech-to-text, while not needing to define the exact language that is spoken.
🔉 Step 2: The translated text from Gemini is sent to Google Speech-to-text HD, because this is faster than Gemini when responding with Audio.
After reading your comment, I was considering adding typing for the waiters in case dialects are an issue, but that would require your phone to have the right keyboard installed. 😓 If you have an idea how to do this, let me know! Thank you for the insight! ❤️🍣
Can I ask if you have tested the software in different countries? I clearly see that it understand different languages, but the point is that the menus are often very differently organised between different countries. (Regardless, a very cool idea, it made me make an account here just to be able to support you guys) How do you tackle this?
@marek_pietuszeko Hi, Marek! This is the reason why something like this was not possible before AI. Especially in China, where the menus can go from left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom, Google Translate was struggling, and so was I - this is what gave me the spark to build Menu, please!
I try to handle it by using a three-step process:
📸 Step 1: Identify the layout, understand the quality of the image, and identify the number of items on the menu.
📖 Step 2: Translate the items, add descriptions, add pronunciation, identify categories, etc.
✅ Step 3: Compare the number of identified items and orientation from Step 1 with the output of Step 2, to avoid obvious hallucinations and issues.
It's not perfect - sometimes Menu, please! gets confused, but the more users use it, the more we learn and can improve our process every single day!
Thank you for your thoughtful comment! ❤️🍣
What's in the belly of Menu, please? (Except for some local and delicious Asian food?)
Frontend: @React @Vite @Tailwind CSS @shadcn
Backend: @Node.js @Prisma
Auth & Database: @Supabase
AI, OCR, Text-to-speech & Speech-to-text: @Gemini @Google
Hosting: @Vercel
I'm a product manager for B2B by trade, and this is my first application that I have developed myself. I'm so grateful for all these tools that have enabled me to solve a problem that I have been thinking about every single time I had to miss out on great local spots, just because the usual translation apps failed. Thank you!❤️
Let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you, everyone, for the amazing Launch Day! We have been overwhelmed by the positive response, all the comments, and all the users joining @Menu, please!!
When we started this project 2 months ago, it was just a little helper to make us better at ordering food, and now we have achieved a TOP 10 launch on Product Hunt and are quickly approaching 1000 active users.
Let's stay in touch, share ideas and positive energy, and make sure to share our latest food adventures!
Love and sushi ❤️🍣,
Krists & Chris from Menu, please!
Lol very interesting point of view, i think it will help a lot when traveling in places with language barrier, good things for food addict.
@joey_zhu1 Yes, this has been my goal, but also the biggest challenge. This is not a menu translator - it's your personal food interpreter. I want to enable people to discover food nose and not ratings first!
That’s awesome! This reminds me of a time when I was in Vietnam and couldn’t understand the menu at all, so I ended up ordering randomly—what an awkward experience.
@hi_caicai Been there done that! I had exactly the same experience in Taiwan - standing there, looking at the menu and just scratching my head... and I can speak Chinese! Let me know if this helps!
Liked the style and the theme much! congrats @hesersu and @chris_118899 for the launch 🚀
@hesersu @chris_118899 @youssef_abdelwahed Thanks! The best products are based on real problems - at it was / is fun trying to solve this one. Also, a cute mascot does not hurt! ❤️
Menu, please!
Thanks a lot!