Waigo App is a Pair of Eyes That Helps You Get a Bellyful of Chinese Food

I must admit that I really love apps that do something enormously useful, thereby taking the strain off of my slowly vegetating brain. The less I have to strain the synapses, the better. And so I jumped upon Waigo as soon as I heard about it, a clever translation app for iPhones that uses the camera to recognize and translate Chinese menus. Yes, that’s quite a niche app, but Waigo makes up for it by doing its task with aplomb, translating and demystifying even the most obscure and idiomatic of Chinese dishes.

A good example might be the dish zi jiang ji. Most apps or dictionaries would just tell you the basic components of this dish – “young ginger” and “chicken” – while Waigo will give you a proper culinary overview by telling you what it really is: chicken with ginger shoots. That sounds good enough to order.

The team behind Waigo has caught the attention of 500 Startups’ Dave McClure who seems to have a thing for specialist language apps that break down borders.

Before hearing from the startup that made the app, I’ll defer to friend-of-the-blog and occasional contributor Matthew Ho for a review of Waigo app, since Matthew is also in this business with a linguistic-minded startup of his own [1].

Much of the Waigo magic is done by optical character recognition (OCR) so that the app can understand Chinese characters that would otherwise leave you baffled. Weighing up Waigo against similar opposition, such as pricey-but-powerful Pleco, or the free-but-limited Soso Huiyan, he explains:

I have also used Pleco and Soso for the same purpose – to try to read menus and Chinese text generally. These are more general tools, not specifically for menus. That’s why I was excited to use Waigo and downloaded it immediately. I’m continually looking to improve my Chinese and practice using menus, and order my food in Chinese. Waigo is a lot easier to use than Pleco and Soso – and actually Soso is in [and designed for] Chinese only.

I like the idea of a menu-specific app, because it probably uses a set of menu words and can do more accurate translations. It’s easier to do it if it’s from a set of food words rather than all kinds of Chinese words. There are still issues with translating phrases and blocks of Chinese text, even with Pleco and Soso. I imagine it’s not easy to do with machines and OCR but it will get better over time as the technology improves [2].

Matthew admits that Waigo sometimes hits a wall with text on certain cans, packages, or printed words, but unclear images will confound any app of this type. And don’t even get us started on family-run restaurants that have hand-written menus. But clearly, Waigo is an impressive app from a very young startup.

A new pair of eyes

Behind Waigo app is TranslateAboard. The team, explains director of business operations, Rob Sanchez, has been taken on as part of the 500 Startups Batch 5 Accelerator program. Rob explains: