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The AI connector lets you hand a merchant’s menu to your own AI assistant — as a photo, a PDF, a screenshot or a spreadsheet in any layout — and have it build a Taliup catalog draft for you. The draft lands in Catalog Builder in Taliup HQ, where you review and commit it as usual. It is the answer to the merchant who emails you a photo of a printed menu.
Connector card titled Build from any menu with your AI assistant, with a read-only connector URL field and a Copy button

The connector card on the Catalog Builder page, showing the connector URL and a copy button.

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How it works

Your AI assistant does the reading. Taliup HQ does the writing.
1

You attach the menu in your AI assistant

The file stays in your assistant. It is never uploaded to Taliup.
2

The assistant asks Taliup for the rules

It fetches the catalog format and the merchant’s existing catalogs, attributes, taxes and tags so it can reuse them instead of creating duplicates.
3

The assistant stages a draft

It sends structured catalog data to Taliup HQ and gets back a review link, along with anything that failed validation so it can correct itself.
4

You review and commit in Taliup HQ

Exactly as with a spreadsheet build.
The connector can read merchant catalog data and stage drafts. It cannot commit, cancel or delete anything. Every change to a live catalog goes through the review screen in Taliup HQ, by a person.

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What it costs

Nothing on the Taliup side. The reading is done by your own AI assistant on your own subscription, so you need a plan that supports custom connectors.

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Connect your assistant

You need the connector URL, shown on the Catalog Builder tab of any merchant. It is the same URL for every merchant — you choose the merchant in conversation, not in the connector.
1

Copy the connector URL

Open any merchant’s Catalog Builder tab and click Copy on the connector card.
2

Add the connector

In Claude, go to Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, and paste the URL.
3

Sign in

Claude sends you to a Taliup HQ sign-in page. Sign in with your normal Taliup HQ account, review what the connector is allowed to do, and click Authorize.
4

Confirm it is available

The Taliup HQ Catalog Builder connector now appears in your connector list and its tools are available in conversation.
The connector authorizes you, not your organization. It can only see merchants you could already open in Taliup HQ, and it inherits your ISO scope. A non-admin account that authorizes it gets no tools at all.

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Build a menu

Attach the merchant’s menu to a new conversation and ask for what you want. For example:
Name the merchant in the message — that is how the assistant knows which account to build for. The connector card in Taliup HQ shows a ready-made line with the merchant’s name already in it, so you can copy it from the merchant you are looking at. A saved prompt called Build menu from source is available in your assistant’s prompt list. It walks the assistant through the whole sequence and is the most reliable way to start. The assistant will name the merchant it picked, or ask you which one if several match. When it finishes it replies with a review link and a summary of what it staged.

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Getting a good draft

Say what you want up front. “Only pages 1 and 2”, “this is the brunch menu”, “add it to the existing Dinner Menu catalog” and “taxes are already set up, don’t create any” all work, and save a correction round trip.
The assistant is told to map menus the way Taliup expects: It is told not to invent items or prices, not to translate names, and to note anything ambiguous rather than guess. Those notes appear at the top of the review screen.

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Build from the merchant’s website

If the merchant publishes their menu on their own site, you can point the assistant at the page instead of chasing a photo:
The assistant fetches the page through Taliup, which returns the readable text, and builds the draft from that. Nothing about the page reaches the merchant’s catalog until you commit. Taliup will only fetch a page when every one of these holds:
Do not use a delivery marketplace listing — Uber Eats, DoorDash, SkipTheDishes. Those prices are marked up to cover the platform’s commission, so a catalog built from them overcharges the merchant’s own walk-in and POS customers. Those domains are not allowlisted, and should not be.
Many restaurant sites render their menu with JavaScript, and some publish it as an image. Taliup reports when a fetched page carries almost no prices, and the assistant is told to say so rather than invent items. If that happens, send a screenshot or the PDF instead.

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Item photos

A fetched page also hands back the item photos it carries, positioned next to the item they belong to, so the assistant can attach the right picture to the right dish. Two things happen to each one automatically:
  • Site furniture is dropped — logos, social buttons, arrows, tracking pixels, and anything the page itself declares smaller than 60 pixels.
  • Thumbnails are replaced with a display-sized copy. Site builders serve a menu photo at whatever size the page happens to show it, often 150 pixels square, which is too small for a POS tile. Taliup asks the site for a copy up to 1,200 pixels wide instead, and narrows anything still larger after downloading. The originals are frequently several megabytes, and every till pays for that on every catalog load.
Images are downloaded and re-hosted on Taliup’s own storage at commit, so the merchant’s catalog does not depend on their old website staying up. Nothing in the catalog ever links to the merchant’s site or their CDN.
The assistant must only use image URLs the fetch returned. A constructed or guessed address cannot be downloaded, and the commit summary will say so. If you asked for images and got none, the page had none Taliup could read; ask for a screenshot rather than letting it improvise.
Some sites serve their pictures perfectly to your browser and refuse Taliup’s servers — Wix is one. Taliup checks before committing and tells you rather than failing forty downloads afterwards. When that happens, add the photos in the review screen with Upload a file instead: your browser fetches what the server cannot, and the picture ends up in exactly the same place. See Item photos on the Catalog Builder page.

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Correcting a staged draft

If validation reports problems, the assistant can fix them and restage without your involvement. You can also ask it to change something after the fact — “make all the salads tax exempt”, “the wine list should be its own catalog” — as long as you have not started committing.
If you edit the draft in Taliup HQ at the same time, whoever saves second is told the draft changed and has to reload. Finish in one place before switching to the other.

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Security

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Troubleshooting

The connector is switched off in this environment. See the setup section of the Catalog Builder page.
The account you authorized with does not have Taliup HQ admin access. Sign out of the connector and reconnect with your admin account.
It only sees merchants in your ISO scope that have the Catalog feature enabled. Confirm both on the merchant’s Entities record, then ask the assistant to list the merchants it can see.
The domain is not on the allowlist, or no domains are allowlisted at all. The assistant’s message names the host it was refused. Ask whoever runs Taliup HQ to add it to MENU_FETCH_ALLOWED_DOMAINS. In the meantime, paste the menu text into the conversation or attach a screenshot.
The menu is probably drawn by JavaScript, or published as a PDF or an image, so there is no text on the page to read. Attach the PDF or a screenshot instead.
Check the commit summary: it counts photos separately and names the reason. The usual one is that the site hosting the pictures refuses requests from Taliup’s servers even though they load in your browser. Add those photos in the review screen with Upload a file instead.
Long or low-contrast menus can be read partially. Ask the assistant which pages it used, then have it restage the missing section. A sharper photo of one page beats a blurry photo of six.