Chowbus and Maple Announce Strategic Partnership to Bring Multilingual Voice AI Ordering to Restaurants

NEW YORK & CHICAGO — Chowbus , the all-in-one restaurant technology platform, and Maple , the leading voice AI platform for restaurants, today announced a partnership that brings multilingual voice AI ordering to Chowbus merchants across the United States and Canada.

Chowbus was built for immigrant restaurant owners, and language has been the through line of the platform since 2016. Menu items carry names in multiple languages. Kitchen tickets print in the language the station reads. The support staff on the other end of the phone speak the owner’s language too. That combination of software, hardware, and people is why thousands of operators run their restaurants on Chowbus, across hot pot, sushi, Korean BBQ, bubble tea, dim sum, pho, and more than 30 Asian cuisine formats that each run a different service model. Maple now extends it to voice, the channel where a guest speaks an order out loud.

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Chowbus already handles multilingual ordering at the counter, on a kiosk, at the table by QR code, and online. While these workflows have all been managed over screens, voice-based workflows have been the exception. A guest who orders in Cantonese reaches whoever happens to pick up, so whether the order gets taken depends on who is on shift and how busy the room is. Restaurants miss roughly 21% to 43% of calls during busy periods, costing a single location around $30,000 a year in unrealized orders. The same gap appears at a kiosk or a drive-thru, where a guest who would rather order in their first language gets a screen in English instead.

Maple is a voice AI automation platform. The same engine takes orders by phone, at a kiosk, and at a drive-thru in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean, staying in the language the guest uses and sending the finished order to Chowbus, where it routes like any other order. Support for Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean is generally available now, and Chowbus merchants are among the first to get it. Spanish, French, and other languages run on the same engine.

“Chowbus started because immigrant restaurant owners needed technology that spoke their language and met their unique needs. Ten years later, that’s true across our POS, our kitchen printers, and our support team. Now, with Maple, we close the last gap: the phone. Every order lands in the same system, in any language,” said Julie Gu, VP of Marketing at Chowbus.

Maple pulls menu data directly from Chowbus, so there is no manual menu programming step and orders are accurate from the start.

“Restaurant owners tell us they cannot afford to hire dedicated staff to work the phone and the counter, and they cannot afford to lose the orders that come through them,” said Aidan Chau, CEO and Founder of Maple. “We built one voice system that works everywhere a guest talks to a restaurant. For a lot of the operators Chowbus serves, those are the moments where their most loyal customers show up, and they have never worked in the customer’s language.