Apple released its first set of public beta versions of iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma on Wednesday. With these releases, the company introduced new features such as full-page screenshots, bilingual Siri and better SMS sorting for dual-SIM users.
The Cupertino-based company has added support for bilingual queries to Siri starting with select Indic languages. This means users will be able to ask queries to Siri by mixing English and Hindi. Additionally, users can mix English with Telugu, Punjabi, Kannada or Marathi. Apple is late to the game, as Google Assistant got multilingual support in 2018 and Amazon launched multilingual support in 2019. This is especially useful for India-based users as they speak a mix of languages in daily conversations.
Apple is also bringing a full-page screenshot feature to iOS 17 — something that Android phones have been offering through “Scrolling screenshots” for years now. Users can save this as an image or a PDF file. Previously, iOS users could only save PDF files of a full-page screenshot.
Users are getting better dual-SIM support with per-SIM sorting of messages, separate ringtones for each SIM and the ability to choose a SIM when calling back an unknown number.
Apple announced a few other improvements with these updates for Indian users across platforms:
- Transliteration support on iOS for Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. With this expansion, Apple now supports 10 Indic languages.
- Users can sign into Apple ID using their phone number instead of an email ID on iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma.
- A new built-in Punjabi dictionary to get definition of words and phrases across platforms.
- Users will be able to see up to 2,000 calls in the call history section, including FaceTime and WhatsApp calls.
- Filtering messages by known and unknown senders on iPad.
Apple will release stable versions of iOS 17, iPad 17 and macOS Sonoma later this fall. The current beta versions will expectedly have some bugs, so if you don’t want to install them on your main device, you can wait for the final public release.