Artificial intelligence is the secret sauce behind Course® Restaurant Guide a new app from Allentown, PA based startup, Hawser LLC.
We’ve been seeing more unique applications of AI in software lately. And whether it’s modifying structured data or unstructured data, the results are usually efficiency based as you often see demonstrated in the financial services market. But when you start seeing AI applied to the food and travel industry, the appeal of streamlined processes is suddenly more applicable to a much wider audience since everyone eats.
Course Restaurant Guide is a new app that takes a novel approach to providing an alternative to public review sites by using AI to learn from private restaurant ratings in order to understand why you like (or don’t like) a restaurant based on your culinary preferences. The more you use the app, the better it gets at predicting your compatibility with restaurants & bars everywhere.
Instead of averaging out ratings by the masses to calculate a one-size-fits-all rating for each restaurant; each and every compatibility score is unique to the specific user.
“Course doesn’t make recommendations as much as it calculates them based on each member’s personal taste. In other words, there’s no person or team of experts sitting in a room deciding where our members should dine based on our elite opinions or the average of all collected public opinions. Our algorithm takes each and every person’s own personal taste into account and then calculates their compatibility with restaurants & bars. That’s one of the biggest differences between Course and every other exiting rating platform.” says Founder Josh Sapienza.
Course collects and organizes information that members submit anonymously including answers to fun “food taste” quizzes when you first download the app (you can take them in multiple sessions but I took them in one sitting) and private personal ratings on everything from the atmosphere to perceived value without anyone else seeing so there’s no online reputation management required by the restaurant.
Hawser’s approach to matching people with restaurants they’re going to love relies more on crowdsourcing commonality among users than public shaming or calling out restaurants which opens the door to disgruntled employees, competitors who might not be acting in good faith or those who’s opinion of what makes a great restaurant might not be the same as yours.
Unlike other in this space, Course focuses on more than just reservation history or the category of food you have delivered most frequently. These guys have written software that actually crowdsources and leverages the biases it’s users have in common.
“The irony is that, in order to remove bias from existing rating & recommendation platforms, we had to build an artificial intelligence algorithm that, in essence, serves as a celebration of bias.” says Sapienza.
They seem less interested in owning the data than in just performing a practical service of restaurant matching. Perhaps that’s why Josh refers to the app as a “dating app for your mouth”.
Course wants to be the source of the world’s most personalized recommendations online. We’re predicting that foodies and travelers will find Course is compatible with their interests, especially those who make lots of lists (it’s bucket list feature seems ideal for travelers who don’t want to waste anytime while restaurant hopping).
Sapienza explains: “At the end of the day, I think it’s a choice between deeper personalization or the loudest voices in the room being the ones with the most influence… we think there are plenty of people who take food seriously enough to appreciate a more efficient and personal recommendation engine and we’re thrilled to be able to present this option.”
Visit Course online: thecourseapp.com
