Love dim sum, but don't know what to order or how to order? Bring this app, find what you like, and tap the speaker icon to hear the dish pronounced in Chinese (Cantonese or Mandarin) using iOS text-to-speech.
I made this app after visiting Hong Kong and trying to crash course learn Cantonese in the food courts. The early focus was just on dim sum and Cantonese text-to-speech and my favorite restaurants, but has since expanded (based on user tips and requests and my own interests) to more broadly cover Chinese and Chinese-adjacent food (over five hundred dishes) and include features such as Mandarin (traditional and simplified), search (English and Chinese), saving favorites, AI camera recognition of dishes, speech-to-text pronunciation practice, basic phrases, and over five hundred restaurants in the US (sorry, I gave up on trying to list every restaurant in the world, it's just not feasible).
Tips:
If the voice is stuck in Cantonese or Mandarin even after switching the tabs in the Practice screen, go to the Settings app, select Accessibility then Spoken Content and check the Chinese voice. If it's not one of the Siri voices, try selecting Siri in Mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan.
If you don't hear the Chinese speech
1) check the mute switch on your iPhone and make sure it isn't on.
2) text-to-speech for a particular voice sometimes seems to require an internet connect, at least on initial use (same with speech-to-text, the microphone practice button).
2) sometimes a device will have trouble accessing the text-to-speech voice (it's the Hong Kong Chinese voice used for Accessibility in Settings), so try turning your device off and on.
Tapping the speaker icon plays back the Chinese pronunciation at half speed to help you learn. Tap the microphone icon to bring up more options, including adjusting the playback speed, switching between Cantonese and Mandarin, and practicing speaking (the speed and language settings are also in Settings).
Aside from the default speed, the speech may sound not quite natural because the app does not play back recorded speech but instead uses iOS text-to-speech functionality, which utters one character (i.e. one syllable) at a time, which may not match how an entire compound word or phrase is normally pronounced (you can hear this effect when using Siri).
The home screen shows categories of dishes. Tap each category to see the dishes. Or tap on the Search button at the top left (some vocabulary items like "takeout" are not in categories but available in via search).
Talk Dim Sum is developed with:
The dim sum icon from Stock Image Folio on Iconfinder.com.
The technicat logo designed by Dakota Snow.
Restaurant link icons from Simple Icons.
Photos from many dim sum excursions.
Regional map images from Wikipedia (Creative Commons License from Wikimedia).
Swift open source packages: AlertToast, ImagePickerView, LinksKit, Qgrid, SQLite.swift, SwiftUIPager, and SwiftyJSON.
This is a great app and I’ve been able to share the names of some favorite dishes with my son. But just today when we opened the app, we were quite upset to find that all the dishes are now in mandarin instead of Cantonese. What happened? I checked the option for Cantonese instead of Mandarin and it’s all still in Mandarin. Please fix. Thank you!
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Response from developer
Update: another user figured out this happens if the voice setting for Chinese is not Siri. I was able to reproduce this behavior and the workaround.
“Since the app uses iOS's text-to-speech, I looked into Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content > Voices > Chinese. I think the problem happens if the user chooses any voice that isn't a "Siri" voice.
So, for example, if "Tingting" was selected, I only hear Mandarin in the app. If I select "Sinji", I only hear Cantonese in the app. When I select any of the "Siri" voices, I can hear both Mandarin and Cantonese in the app.”
