Restaurant daily special video: change the price with cues

A restaurant can film one silent clip of its best dish and change the special and price every day by burning new text onto it with Sume's video captions and the cues field. Each caption job is $0.20 for a video up to 60 seconds under the current fixed estimate, so a week of daily specials costs $1.40 and no new filming.

Google's limits come from its Business Profile help page on photos and videos (read 2026-10-02). Sume does not post to Google, and it cannot tell you whether Google will approve a given video.

What does Google require for a Business Profile video?

The help page lists videos up to 30 seconds, up to 75 MB, at 720p or higher. It says videos appear on the profile after review, and that it can take up to 24 to 48 hours before photos and videos show. A video carries one of three statuses: Pending (not yet reviewed), Not approved (policy violations) or Live.

The 24 to 48 hour review window matters for a daily special. A video posted at breakfast may not be live for lunch, so this approach suits a weekly rotation better than a same-day price change. Use it on your own site and social posts where timing is in your hands.

How do cues put the special on the clip?

Speech-based captions need audible speech. A silent clip fails as caption_no_speech with next_action: use_overlay_captions. Passing cues, each with text, start and end in seconds, burns your own overlay copy and skips speech-to-text, so a muted kitchen clip is fine.

script_text, words, cues and segments are mutually exclusive. Pick a style; slam is the Latin default. Move the line with design.placement.anchor_ratio, the line centre as a fraction of frame height, so the price does not sit on the plate:

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: special-2026-10-03" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/ramen-silent.mp4",
    "style": "slam",
    "design": { "placement": { "anchor_ratio": 0.8 } },
    "cues": [
      { "text": "Friday special", "start": 0, "end": 3 },
      { "text": "Spicy miso ramen $14", "start": 3, "end": 9 }
    ]
  }'

What does a week cost, and what does a change cost?

Every new price or new dish is a new caption job. The restyle option, source_caption_id, reuses the earlier job's video and word timings so no second speech-to-text runs, but billing is unchanged: a restyle is still a render. It changes the look, not the cues you authored, so changing the text means a fresh job with new cues.

Keep one idempotency key per day, such as special-2026-10-03. Replaying a key returns the same job, so a retry after a network error does not double-charge you.

What should you check before it goes live?

If the source clip is longer than 30 seconds, cut it first with video trim; the full workflow is in Google Business Profile video, 30 seconds, 75 MB. For a first clip from stills, see restaurant video advertising with AI.

• Length: keep the clip under 30 seconds if it is headed for Google.
• Size: the captioned MP4 must still be under 75 MB; Sume's docs do not state output size, so check the file.
• Legibility: pull a still with video frames to see whether the price clears the dish.
• Accuracy: cues are burned exactly as written, including a wrong price.

Can I schedule this?

Sume documents scheduled agent runs, but a caption call is a plain HTTP request, so the simplest schedule is a cron entry on your own machine that posts the day's cues from a small text file. Because the cue text is yours, the job does not need an agent to decide anything.

Put the special name and price in one source of truth, such as the same file your menu page reads, so the video never disagrees with the menu. A video that shows yesterday's price is worse than no video.