Apple introduced the latest iOS 18 at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) last month. Following the announcement, the company has rolled out two developer betas in recent weeks, expanding support for various new languages across the lock screen, Siri, keyboard, and search features on iOS 18.
With this update, users can now personalize the lock screen to display time in different numerals, supporting 12 languages including Arabic, Arabic Indic, Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki, and Telugu.
The iOS keyboard has also received significant updates, now supporting trilingual predictive typing system-wide. Users can view additional language scripts beside the suggestion field and seamlessly switch between them. Furthermore, you can type in Latin text and receive suggestions in all three languages without needing to switch between them.
In the Messages app, the keyboard will now remember the last language used in a particular thread if multiple threads are in different languages. The trilingual keyboard now supports English, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu. Additionally, a Korean and English multiscript keyboard has been added to iOS 18.
iOS 18 also enhances language search capabilities, enabling users to search for different spellings of similar-sounding words in a specific language. For example, in Hindi, users can search for both “चंद्र” and “चन्द्र”. This new language search feature is available for Assamese, Bangla, Devanagari, and Gujarati languages.
Some other language-related updates in iOS 18 include:
- Live voicemail transcription support has been added for Indian English.
- The Translate app on iOS 18 now supports Hindi.
- The Live Text feature now includes support for Arabic.
- A new grammar engine has been introduced for Hindi and Korean.
- Users can create contact posters using Indian languages and numerals.
The public version of iOS 18 is expected to be released this fall for all users. The features mentioned above are available in beta versions of iOS 18, which might have bugs, so it’s advisable not to install them on your primary device.
