Apple adds support for new languages across lock screen, keyboard and search on iOS 18 | TechCrunch

Apple unveiled iOS 18 at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) last month. Since then, the company has released two developer betas in the last few weeks, adding expanded support for several new languages ​​across the lock screen, Siri, keyboard, and Search on iOS 18.

With the new update, you can now customize the lock screen to show time in different numerals with support for 12 languages: Arabic, Arabic Indic, Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki, Telugu.

The keyboard on iOS gets several updates, including support for trilingual predictive typing across the system. You can see additional language scripts to the left and right of the suggestion field and easily switch between them. Also, you can type Latin text and get suggestions for all three languages ​​based on your input without switching.

In the Messages app, if you have multiple threads running in different languages, the keyboard will remember the language you last used for a particular thread. The trilingual keyboard supports English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu. Apart from this, the company has also added support for Korean and English multiscript keyboards on iOS 18.

iOS 18 also features an improved language search feature, allowing users to search for different spellings of similar-sounding words in that language. For example, they can search for both “chandra” and “chandra” in Hindi. The new language search is available for Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, and Gujarati.

Some other language-related updates with iOS 18 include:

• The company has added support for live voicemail transcription in Indian English.

• Translate app gets Hindi support on iOS 18.
• Live text feature Now supports Arabic.
• New grammar engine for Hindi and Korean.
• You can create contact posters using Indian languages ​​and numerics.

Apple will release the public version of iOS 18 for all users in the fall of this year. The features mentioned above will be available in beta versions of iOS 18, which may contain bugs and you may not want to install them on your primary device.