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

Apple unveiled iOS 18 last month at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Since then, the company has released two developer betas in the last few weeks with extended support for multiple new languages across the lock screen, Siri, the 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, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki, Telugu.

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

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

Also included in iOS 18 is improved language search, so users can search for different spellings of similar-sounding words in that language. For instance, they can search for both “चंद्र” and “चन्द्र” in Hindi. The new language search is available for Assamese, Bangla, 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 gets support for Hindi.
• The live text feature now supports Arabic.
• New grammar engine for Hindi and Korean.
• You can create contact posters using Indian languages and numerals.

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