Meet the Talking Menu
Will an entrepreneur's pricey new audio gizmo, Menus That Talk, catch on with diners and restaurateurs?
For Susan Perry, it was a forgetful moment that would change her life. After sitting down for lunch with her niece at a restaurant in Miami last August, the 50-year-old owner of a small export business realized that she'd left her reading glasses behind. And her niece couldn't help, since she herself suffers from macular degeneration, an affliction that has left her legally blind. So when Perry joked that they needed a menu written in Braille, her niece reminded her that few visually impaired people can read Braille. As Perry sat there thinking of what else would work, a light bulb went off in her head. "I started drawing on napkins that night," she recalls.
Three months and $300,000 of her own money later, Perry had finished the first prototypes of her new product: "Menus that Talk," a book-sized device that lets diners push buttons to hear the different items on a restaurant's menu. And in the intervening year, she's become more resolute than ever that there's an untapped market for the devices: 7% of the U.S. population cannot read a menu printed in English, either because of vision loss or an inability to read the language. And as her niece noted, only 10% of visually impaired Americans can read Braille, which is the current approach used by most restaurants. Perry is obsessed with replacing Braille menus. "I tease and say that I stopped working in August, because when I do this I don't feel like I'm working; I feel like everything else is a distraction from this," says Perry. "This is my life."
Expensive Patent
For all of Perry's enthusiasm, some industry experts question whether restaurants will pony up the hefty tab—roughly $800 each—that Perry and her company, Taylannas, plans to charge for each unit, or whether diners will make the investment in time that's necessary to grasp how the device works (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/23/07, "Your Waiter Today Will Be a Computer"). "Would it not be less intrusive for a friend or family member to just say, 'Here are some things that are on the menu?'" asks Dennis Lombardi, an executive vice-president and food service strategist at WD Partners, an Ohio-based consulting firm.
To her credit, Perry has a track record of turning her ideas into business success: After graduating from the University of Central Florida with a degree in humanities, she bounced around between jobs for several years. But Perry says she yearned to work for herself, so she and her husband at the time started their own company exporting office supplies to the Caribbean. After her divorce in 2002, Perry started a second business of her own, Transformation Dynamics, which does interior design work for banks and credit unions in the Caribbean as well as exporting office supplies that range from pens and paper clips to desks and building materials.
But by Perry's own admission, turning her scribblings on a cocktail napkin into a menu that actually talked has so far proven more of a challenge than her earlier business ventures. A month after her epiphany, Perry turned to longtime friend Richard Herbst, a marketing executive at Control Vision Corp. in Pittsburg, Kan., which makes GPS equipment for small airplanes. As the menu evolved, Perry and Control Vision ran into problems ranging from finding the proper battery (the cell-phone batteries that Control Vision first used would overheat and shut down) to deciding where to locate the audio headset. After Control Vision produced the first prototypes, Perry rushed to hire lawyers who could help her obtain a patent. "Lawyers are expensive," says Perry, who estimates that she spent $150,000 just on the prototype and legal fees.
Undetermined Cost
Perry's newly patented product is a plastic device roughly the size of a paperback book that has 20 thumbnail-sized buttons that help users navigate between different sections of a menu. There's a volume control, buttons that let users choose between English and Spanish, as well as a "service" button that, when pressed, flashes blue to attract the waiter's attention. When a diner pushes a button, the device informs them, via recordings made by professional readers,which section of the menu they've selected, such as appetizers, soups, or entrees (and which are organized in the order of a traditional meal). Push the same button again, and the device then rattles off each item in that section, complete with descriptions and prices. The device also has a detachable speaker that can be used to funnel sound directly into the hearing aid of a hearing impaired patron.
Perry, who just received the first prototypes from Control Vision in May, hasn't settled on a price. For now, she's mulling the idea of charging $4,000 for five units, though she's willing to slash that price significantly for major restaurant chains that buy in bulk. The effective cost for owners of small restaurants would be less as well, since they'd qualify for tax breaks for providing a service to the disabled—a tax break that Perry says would cut the net cost to small restaurateurs roughly in half.
But buying the units is only the first step. Perry also requires that purchasers who want to update their menus in the future must pay for new recordings by Menus That Talk's professional readers (which the restaurateurs can download via the Internet). Perry hasn't determined how much the update service will cost, but is unwilling to budge on letting restaurants update the menus themselves, because she wants to maintain the professional quality of Menus That Talk—and provide her company with a future annuity stream.
Future Fixture?
Lombardi, the industry consultant, wonders if the cost of having to pay Taylannas for menu updates will be the deal breaker for many restaurants. "Restaurants need to consider: How big is the need relative to the cost?" he says. "If it has a use, it will be pushed by legislation (mandating that restaurants meet the special needs of the disabled) rather than pulled by consumer need and industry response to consumer need."
So far, Perry says she hasn't received any orders in the four weeks she's been seriously marketing the new devices. And a few major chains contacted by BusinessWeek say they have no plans for now to purchase the Menus That Talk. "We print large-type Braille menus for sight-impaired guests," Rick Johnson, a senior vice-president for Ruby Tuesday (RT), wrote in an e-mail. "We do not currently have plans for the implementation of a device [like Perry's]."
But Perry remains optimistic, claiming that she got a positive reception at the recent National Restaurant Association Show from such companies as Hooters, Disney (DIS), and Universal Studios. "We had considerable interest from big (restaurant) chains," Perry says. She says she's also been contacted by some government agencies, including the Veterans Affairs Dept., and has also received interest from governments in Australia and India. If Perry's dream is realized, her talking menus could be as much of a fixture at restaurants as the napkin on which it was drawn up.
Brian Burnsed is an intern for BusinessWeek based in Atlanta.
