AI Menu Visualizer: Bringing Restaurant Menus to Life
This post is my submission for DEV Education Track: Build Apps with Google AI Studio.
What I Built
I created an AI Menu Visualizer that transforms static restaurant menus into vibrant visual experiences. Using Google's Gemini AI, the app can analyze both English and Chinese menu text, identify dish names, and generate photorealistic images for each dish. The key prompts include menu text extraction with structured JSON output and carefully crafted image generation prompts for appetizing, professional food photography.
Demo
Code is here: [https://github.com/williamhatch/ai-menu-visualizer]
Key Features:
- Bilingual menu support (English & Chinese)
- Real-time dish detection and image generation
- Modern, responsive UI with Tailwind CSS
- Progress tracking for multi-dish menus
- Error handling and graceful fallbacks
My Experience
Building with Google AI Studio and Gemini was surprisingly intuitive. Key takeaways:
Multimodal Power: Gemini's ability to understand both text and images made menu analysis seamless. The model handles bilingual content exceptionally well.
Structured Output: Using the
responseMimeType: "application/json"config ensures clean, parseable responses - crucial for production applications.Image Generation Quality: Gemini's Imagen model produces consistently high-quality food photography, though prompting requires careful crafting for best results.
Developer Experience: The
@google/genaiSDK is well-documented and TypeScript-friendly, making integration straightforward.
The most challenging aspect was optimizing the image generation prompts to produce consistent, appetizing results across diverse cuisine types. The solution was to standardize the prompt structure with specific photography-focused language.
This project demonstrates how AI can enhance real-world dining experiences by bridging the gap between text menus and visual presentation.
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