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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 it's since expanded (with user tips and requests) to more broadly cover Chinese (and Chinese-American) food and include featrures (some user-requested) such as Mandarin (traditional and simplified), search (English and Chinese), saving favorites, AI camera recognition of dishes, speech-to-text practice, and restaurants around the world (but they have to serve Cantonese dim sum, at least ha gow and siu mai, and I don't have a worldwide travel budget, so if I didn't list your favorite eateries, please let me know what they are!).
Known issues:
On iOS 16 (at least on iPhone 14), text-to-speech (tapping the speaker icon) speaks very softly after using speech-to-text (tapping the microphone icon), also affects the mute switch.
Tips:
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 app supports landscape orientation on iPads, but to see full dish descriptions you have to rotate to portrait mode.
You can also search for dishes on the Search screen, and the individual dish pages have a tags menu that directs you to related dishes.
Dish pages also have links to more information and recipes on various web sites, including China Sichuan Food, Dim Sum Guide, Dimsumptuous, Panda Cheffy, Unfamiliar China, Wikipedia, The Woks of Life....
A growing list (over fifteen hundred so far) of dim sum restaurants worldwide is provided, along with regional maps and links to web sites and reviews. If you live in an area not covered or know of a restaurant I missed, just let me know and I'll add it!
Related Cantonese vocabulary and links to dim sum and Cantonese resources also listed.
Stay tuned for more dishes in updates. Missing your favorite dish or want to recommend a restaurant or have other comments/suggetions/corrections? Please drop a review or send feedback using one of the links in the top left Technicat menu.
Talk Dim Sum is developed with:
The dim sum icon from Stock Image Folio on Iconfinder.com.
The technicat logo designed by Dakota Snow.
Photos from many dim sum excursions.
Regional map images from Wikipedia (Creative Commons License from Wikimedia).
The following Swift open source packages: AlertToast, ImagePickerView, Qgrid, SQLite.swift, SwiftLog, SwiftUIPager, and SwiftyJSON.
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