Parsing menus is difficult: fonts, layouts, langages and structures can vary from one to another. This API allows you to convert complex menus into a structured list of items in less than 5s. It supports regular, funky and handwritten menus (more in the video)
I appreciate how difficult this problem is! I'm curious, what have you found to be the main use-case/user for this product?
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Maker
@drlynam Hi Dave! Great question.
I found that many products are now doing online menus yet it is quite long process especially if you have many pages in your menu. Even one page will take you awhile to digitise.
The idea is to help anyone who's into online menus to get this task done quickly. There is a lot of maths behind this, it is not a simple project.
If you actually check online, no one really came up with a good solution, and that's for a reason.
I worked on this for a long time and that's why it works great now. I thought this would be useful to people you know :)
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@drlynam We're trying something similar to this a few years ago, combining with Voiceover/Talkback on smartphone, for visually impared people to order without a braille menu, which very few restaurants have. We didn't do very well back then though, because Chinese character recognition is much harder, and market is pretty small. But I believe it's a great use case for non-profit anyway.
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This is awesome! I'm definitely very interested in testing out this product. Great job! Is your chat channel on your website the best way to get in touch?
The video makes it look very interesting. However, I don't see any way of actually accessing it on the website.
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Maker
@new_user_1873203600 Just reach out to me through the website/twitter and we can set things up. Just trying to pick who really needs access for now to keep it under control! Hope you understand. Just message me there if you're interested, I like to keep things human :)
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Maker
Hi everyone!
I rarely post here, so this is a project that I promise will really tickle your curiosity!
Parsing menus is a terribly hard task. You can try doing it with regular OCR and trust me, you just get a bunch of words without any other connection.
I worked on this project for a few months since there was no great solution out there.
It is now available for anyone who would need to quickly convert menus into structured data (delivery platforms, online menus and shops). The API is simple and I thought of licensing its access for free if this could improve your product.
I really hope this can be useful to people. Any question and feedback will be truly appreciated.
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