Apple unveiled iOS 18 at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last month. Since then, the company has released two developer betas in the past few weeks, expanding support for several new languages across iOS 18's lock screen, Siri, keyboard, and search.
With the new update, you can now customise your lock screen to display time in different numerals with support for 12 languages - Arabic, Arabic Indic, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki and Telugu.
Image credit: Apple
The iOS keyboard has received a number of updates, including system-wide support for predictive typing in three languages. Additional language scripts will appear to the left and right of the suggestion field for easy switching. Additionally, when you enter Latin text, suggestions in all three languages will appear based on what you type, without the need to switch.
Image credit: Apple
In the Messages app, if you have multiple threads running in different languages, the keyboard will remember the last language you used in a particular thread. The trilingual keyboard supports English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu. Additionally, the company has also added support for Korean and English multiscript keyboards in iOS 18.
iOS 18 also improves Language Search, allowing users to search for different spellings of similar sounding words in that language. For example, you can search for both “चंद्र” and “चन्द्र” in Hindi. The new Language Search is available in Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari and Gujarati.
Other language updates in iOS 18 include:
The company has added support for live voicemail transcription in Indian English.
Image Credit: Apple The Translator app in iOS 18 now supports Hindi. The Live Text feature now supports Arabic. New grammar engine for Hindi and Korean. You can create contact posters using Indian languages and numbers.
Apple is expected to release the public version of iOS 18 to all users this fall. While the above features are available in the beta version of iOS 18, they may be buggy and you may not want to install it on your main device.