Weekly Update #3

Hey everyone!

What a week!

Menu, please! has now reached over 300 active users and is growing every day. 🚀

That’s not just exciting — it’s incredibly helpful. With so many of you using the app in the wild, we’re learning a ton about what’s working and where we can improve.

A special shoutout to Reddit user u/Professional-Name407, who shared some seriously tough menus that completely stumped the app. That kind of real-world feedback helped us improve how we analyze menus, especially the more complex ones.

This menu was pushing not only the limits of Gemini, but also Krist’s wife Tiff, who is a native Taiwanese speaker. What a challenge!

We’re still working on handling difficult handwritten menus, but thanks to these improvements, 99% of other menus now process much more reliably. Thank you!

✨ New Features

📱 Show, not tell We’ve added a full-screen mode to the chat feature — now you can show your translated message to restaurant staff without needing to play audio.

🍽️ Category Navigation Large menus can be overwhelming, so we’ve added categories at the top of the translated view to help you jump between sections and get a better overview of what’s available.

🧾 Order Overview You’ll now see a counter for how many dishes you’ve selected before hitting Order Now. It’s a small touch, but it helps keep things clear, especially when ordering for a group.

⚙️ Performance Improvements & Fixes

• Image compression before upload: Large images are now automatically compressed, so you shouldn’t run into the “Image too large” error anymore.
• Improved menu analysis: We’ve upgraded to gemini-2.5-flash-preview-05-20, which brings smarter and more accurate processing.
• Better handling of uncertainty: We’ve reduced the chances of hallucinated translations by fine-tuning how uncertain menus are processed.
• Faster timeouts: If something goes wrong, the app will now fail faster, saving you time and helping us debug more efficiently.

💌 Weekly Thank You

• Olle Linge from Hacking Chinese — thank you so much for featuring Menu, please! as a resource for your students! Your site has been a huge part of my Chinese learning journey, so this truly means a lot.
• Brian Koetting — thank you for buying us a Boba on Buy me a coffee! Your support keeps us going (and hydrated 🧋).
• u/Professional-Name407 — your challenge helped make Menu, please! stronger. We’re incredibly grateful!

Thanks again to everyone using Menu, please! and helping shape what it becomes. We have so much more to build — and we can’t wait to share it with you.

Have a great weekend, and talk soon!

– Krists & Chris