Mobile app startup is using technology to improve the Chinese culinary experience for foodies, travelers, tourists and expats.
SAN FRANCISCO – Waygo, an augmented reality (AR) visual translation app that translates Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages to English with the wave of a smartphone, announces the launch of its food photo feature to provide greater context and clarity to its Chinese menu translations. The app’s new feature includes the top 4,000 Chinese dishes, and more than 14,000 curated images. It gives users an in-depth knowledge of foreign cuisine by providing detailed images of how food dishes are prepared while browsing restaurant menus.
“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,” said Kevin Clark co-founder and product director of Waygo. “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 Waygo team researched Chinese restaurant menus to determine the most commonly listed dishes and combined these findings with data from popular menu items scanned by Waygo users. Using a combination of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and offline image processing, Waygo’s food photo feature provides an English translation of each menu item along with photos of dish variations.
Waygo’s food photo feature update follows just one month after Waygo announced its app redesign for clearer and faster translations. Highlights of Waygo’s app redesign include clickable translations in every language, a revamped history and favorites section, improved capture photo-mode, advanced pronunciation features and high-quality camera scanning.
“Waygo has evolved as a premier menu translation app that encourages travelers to live and dine like the locals, without the worry of ordering the wrong menu item,” said Ryan Rogowski CEO and co-founder of Waygo. “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 of the local food and couldn’t understand Chinese.”
The food photo feature is currently available for Chinese translations, with Japanese and Korean updates coming soon. The update is available on Waygo’s app for download through the Apple Store and is compatible with iOS devices.
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