Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus
I’ve found that these sorts of annotations are a lot better in the US than in other industrialized countries. In foreign countries, points of interest in Google Maps are often missing basic info like opening hours or even telephone numbers. Often times the actual location is misplaced on the map.<p>When it comes specifically to restaurant menus in the US, most seem to be manually transcribed by the restaurant staff. The items and prices are correct (but often out of date), and food descriptions faithfully reproduce non-native spelling/grammar mistakes. In addition, I almost always see user-uploaded photos of the menus.<p>This does not point to a difference in Google’s automatic parsers or in the level of Google-generated content; it seems that US users contribute to map and PoI content a lot more.<p>I wonder why this is. My guess is that there are far fewer staff members at Google curating crowdsourced content outside of the US, which makes non-American users much less likely to contribute, since their contributions will appear much more slowly, if at all. I’ve contributed my own corrections to PoI data in the US (e.g. opening hours updates) and seen it reflected on the map in a few days. This probably wouldn’t happen elsewhere in the world.