Dhaba.ai handles orders via WhatsApp, voice, and web using conversational AI. Here's how we designed the system architecture and trained it to understand Indian menus.
Traditional POS systems were designed for a world where every order comes through a counter or a waiter. Dhaba.ai was built for the reality of Indian food service, where orders come through WhatsApp messages, phone calls, walk-ins, and delivery platforms simultaneously. The system needed to be conversational, multilingual, and smart enough to handle the complexity of Indian menus.
Architecture for Multi-Channel Orders
Dhaba.ai processes orders from WhatsApp, voice calls, and web interfaces through a unified order pipeline. Each channel has its own input adapter that converts the incoming message or speech into a structured intent, but all channels share the same order processing, inventory, and billing engine. This ensures consistency regardless of how the order arrives.
Understanding Indian Food
Indian restaurant menus are uniquely challenging for NLP systems. Dishes have regional variations in naming, portion sizes vary by establishment, and customisations like "less spicy" or "extra butter" are common. We built a domain-specific understanding layer that maps colloquial food descriptions to menu items, handles customisation requests naturally, and manages substitutions when items are unavailable.
Smart Inventory and Analytics
Beyond order taking, Dhaba.ai tracks ingredient consumption in real time, predicts demand based on historical patterns and external factors, and alerts restaurant owners when stock is running low. The analytics dashboard shows revenue trends, popular items, peak hours, and waste metrics, giving owners the data they need to make better business decisions.
The biggest takeaway from building Dhaba.ai is that vertical AI products, those built deeply for a specific industry, consistently outperform horizontal solutions that try to serve everyone. Understanding the nuances of Indian food service is what makes the system genuinely useful to restaurant owners.
