Apple adds support for new languages ​​on the lock screen, keyboard and search in iOS 18

Apple unveiled iOS 18 last month at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Since then, the company has released two developer betas in recent weeks with expanded support for several new languages ​​on the Lock screen, Siri, keyboard, and search in iOS 18.

With the new update, you can now customize the lock screen to display time in different digits with support for 12 languages: Arabic, Indian Arabic, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki, Telugu.

The keyboard on iOS is getting 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. Additionally, you can type in Latin text and get suggestions for all three languages ​​based on your typing without having to switch.

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

iOS 18 also brings improved language search, which lets users search for different spellings of similar words in that language. For example, they can search for both “चंद्र” and “चन्द्र” in Hindi. The new language search is available for Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, and Gujarati.

Some other language-related updates with iOS 18 include the following:

• The company has added support for live voicemail transcription in Indian English.
• The Translate app on iOS 18 now supports Hindi.
• Live Text feature now supports Arabic.
• New grammar engine for Hindi and Korean.
• You can create contact posters using Indian languages ​​and numbers.

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