Groundbreaking App Will Translate Restaurant Menus For You When You Travel to Asia

August 30, 2016

Many of us might love authentic Chinese food, but sometimes we just need help figuring out what we’re ordering on the menu.

Now, translating foreign menus is easy thanks to an app.

Waygo is an augmented reality visual translation app that just launched its food photo feature, reports Yahoo. It vows to “provide greater context and clarity” in translating Chinese food menus.

Waygo co-founder and product director Kevin Clark said:

“Translating a menu might tell you generally what the dish is, but doesn’t give users the full story. Our food photo feature makes it easier to be more adventurous when ordering off foreign menus with confidence and understanding. This feature is the result of years of effort, which originally started out as a drive to improve the quality of food-related translations in Waygo.”

The new feature packs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and offline image processing under its hood, allowing efficient translation. It stores 4,000 Chinese dishes and more than 14,000 images.

Interestingly, the app uses minimal disk space and works even without an internet connection.

Meanwhile, co-founder and CEO Ryan Rogowski shared:

“Waygo has evolved as a premiere menu translation app that encourages travelers to live and dine like the locals, without the worry of ordering the wrong menu item. After spending one year in China as an iOS developer, I became inspired to create Waygo because I was stuck ordering the same dish, Kung Pao chicken, because I wasn’t knowledgeable about the local food and couldn’t understand Chinese.”

Other than Chinese, Waygo also translates Japanese and Korean to English. It is currently available for iOS and Android.

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