Apple adds support for additional languages across the lock screen, keypad, and search in iOS 18
Apple opened iOS 18 at a conference of its Global Developers last month (WWDC). Since then, the company has released two developers in the recent weeks and has expanded its support for several new languages on the search screen, Siri, keyboard and iOS 18 search. With the new update, you can now customize your lock screen to display the time with different numbers in 12 languages: Arabic, Arabic, Indian, Bengali, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Olchiki, Telugu. The iOS keyboard has received many updates, including support for system-wide trilingual sensitive input. You can see other language scripts on the left and right of the recommended field, and you can easily switch between them. In addition, you can enter the Latin text to get all three languages and you don't need to change after entering. In messaging apps, if you have multiple threads running in different languages, their keyboards will remember the last language you used for a particular thread. Trilingual keyboard supports English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu. In addition, the company has also added support for Korean and English multi-character keyboard in iOS 18.
iOS 18 also improves language search, allowing users to search for different spellings of words that sound similar in the language. For example, they can search for both “चन्द्र” and “चन्द्र” in Hindi. The new language search is available in Assamese, Bangu, Devanagari and Gujarati.
Some other language-related updates with iOS 18 include:
- The company has added support for live voicemail transcription in Indian English.
- The translate app on iOS 18 gets support for Hindi. Live text now supports Arabic.
- New grammar engine for Hindi and Korean. You can create contact posters using Indian languages and numbers.
- Apple releases the public version of iOS 18 in the fall for all users. The above features will be available in iOS 18 beta, which may be buggy and you may not want to install them on your main device.