Menu, please! blog Hey everyone!
We’ve got some amazing news to share:
Menu, please! is now officially part of the Google for Startups Cloud Program! 🎉
From day one, we’ve relied on Google Cloud APIs to make the magic happen — translating menus, turning text into speech, and enabling live multilingual conversations. This week, we received official support from Google, which means we’ll be able to take full advantage of the Google Cloud Platform and make Menu, please! even better.
🚀 What We’ve Learned
With over 350 active users, we’re continuing to learn every single day.
This week, we uncovered something big:
While most of our services work well globally, we’ve discovered that some Google services are restricted not just in mainland China, but also in Hong Kong — and that has unexpected consequences for travelers in Taiwan using Hong Kong-based eSIMs.
This impacts how we upload and translate menus using Google Gemini API in these regions. The good news is: we’ve figured out how to fix it. But the fix requires a major rebuild of how we translate menus.
So in the coming weeks, we’re hitting pause on new features to focus on stability, reliability, and making sure Menu, please! works seamlessly — even in edge cases like these. We think it’s 100% worth it.
**✨ New Features
🌀 Improved Loading Experience
We’ve added a much clearer loading flow, with visual feedback for uploading, translating, and finalizing the menu. No more guessing what’s happening — and no more accidental refreshes that cancel everything.
💬 Chat Like It’s Supposed To Be
We updated the chat interface to behave more like WhatsApp or iMessage — showing a live “message loading” state so you know something is happening behind the scenes. This should help reduce interruptions while translations are still in progress.
📰 New Blog Is Live!
We’re now posting all updates (like this one!) on the Menu, please! Blog. This makes it easier for new users to find our updates and lets us share real-world travel experiences using Menu, please! as our ordering companion.
🐞 Known Issues (And What We’re Fixing)
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🌐 Google Service Restrictions: Uploads to the Gemini API are failing in mainland China and Hong Kong. Users with Hong Kong eSIMs in Taiwan are also affected. We’re rebuilding the translation pipeline to solve this.
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🔄 Page Refresh = Crash: The current MVP doesn’t handle page refreshes well, often cancelling ongoing translations. This will be redesigned from the ground up.
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⚠️ Poor Error Handling: Right now, errors often stop the translation without giving any feedback. We’ve started talking directly with users affected, and improving this is a top priority for the next few weeks.
💌 Weekly Thank You
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To all our users — thank you for pushing Menu, please! in unexpected and creative ways. Your feedback (timeouts and all!) is helping us build something real — without you, we’d be developing in the dark.
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Yann Duval & Hongxiang Liu — you’ve been incredibly generous with your time and advice. As a beginner, having experienced engineers to spar with has made a huge difference.
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Sven Schwalbe & Maria-Sophie Steinkraus — thank you for the seamless onboarding to the Google for Startups Cloud Program. We’re incredibly excited to see what we can build with your support.
Have a great weekend and happy ordering!
– Krists & Chris