Apple unveiled iOS 18 last month at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Since then, the company has released two developer betas in the past few weeks with expanded support for multiple new languages across the lock screen, Siri, keyboard, and search on iOS 18.
With the new update, you can now customize your lock screen to show time in different numbers with support for 12 languages: Arabic, Hindi Arabic, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Mithai, Odia, All Chikki, Telugu.
The iOS keyboard is getting a bunch of updates, including support for predictive typing in three languages across the system. You can see additional language text to the left and right of the suggestion field and easily switch between them. Additionally, you can type in Latin script 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 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 multi-text keyboard in Korean and English on iOS 18.
iOS 18 also brings improved language search, so users can search for different spellings of similarly pronounced words in that language. For example, they can search for “चंद्र” and “चन्द्र” in Hindi. The new language search is available for Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, and Gujarati.
Some other language-related updates in iOS 18 include:
- The company has added support for direct voicemail transcription in English and Hindi.
- The Translate app on iOS 18 gets support for Hindi.
- Live Text Feature Supports Arabic language now.
- New grammar engine for Hindi and Korean.
- You can create contact stickers using Indian languages and numbers.
Apple will release the public version of iOS 18 this fall to all users. The above features will be available in beta versions of iOS 18, which may have bugs, and you may not want to install them on your primary device.