The Sahil Bachu
Vol. I · No. 579Rochester, New York, Thursday, September 24, 2026Restaurant tech · Page B22
All workSection B · Page B22

Restaurant techOn-Device Restaurant Assistant

A Restaurant iPad That Runs Its Own AI, Offline

An iPad demo that runs Llama 3.2 1B and Whisper on the device for order-taking, a menu kiosk and end-of-shift summaries.

By Sahil BachuMobilePrototype

Graphic4 steps
  1. SpeakVoice order on the iPad
  2. TranscribeWhisper Tiny on device
  3. ReasonLlama 3.2 1B with the menu in its prompt
  4. ShowOrder, upsells and allergen banner
What happens inside On-Device Restaurant Assistant, in order.Graphic: The Sahil Bachu

Rochester, N.Y. A point of sale can't stop working when the Wi-Fi drops, so I built a demo where the AI runs on the iPad itself. It has three tabs. The server assistant parses natural-language orders, suggests upsells and raises allergen alerts. The customer kiosk answers menu questions. The manager tab summarizes the shift.

Llama 3.2 1B and Whisper Tiny run through react-native-executorch. Each mode has its own system prompt with the full sample menu (about 30 items with allergens, modifiers and pairings) built in, plus a rolling 6-message history. Every screen shows an offline badge and live tokens per second, so someone non-technical can see the model really is local. It was a one-day pitch demo, so the menu and the shift data are samples. The first launch downloads roughly 1.5 GB of model weights.

More from The Work

See all 25

On-device AI

A Voice Journal That Listens and Never Phones Home

A private self-reflection app that transcribes your voice notes, reflects on them and chats about them with models that run on the phone.

Record a vent, and [witness] transcribes it, pulls out a title, summary and insights, and lets you talk it through, grounded in your own past entries. Whisper and Qwen3 run on the phone, so your entries stay with you.

Prototype · 2026

Continued on Page B13

Mobile AI

Every Icon on This Homescreen Started as a Sentence

A phone homescreen where every icon is a mini-app that Claude wrote and a build server compiled from a plain-English description.

Describe a tool, Claude writes it as React code, a build server bundles it, and it runs on your phone in a sandbox. Each mini-app gets storage, the mic, the calendar, the camera and AI through a native bridge.

Prototype · 2026

Continued on Page B10

Just for fun

Upload a Selfie, Get Roasted Like You're From Bangalore

A multimodal web app where Gemini roasts your photo in Bangalore English and a voice reads it back, word by word.

Upload a photo and Gemini roasts you in Bangalore English, then a voice reads the roast aloud while the words appear one at a time. A one-day build, live on Vercel.

Live · 2026

Continued on Page B20