iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma permit the Siri digital assistant to speak and understand two languages at the same time.
Bilingual Siri initially supports English and select Indic languages at the same time. Apple developed this feature to make Siri more useful in India, where people mix English with other Indic languages in daily conversations.
Apple’s support document reveals that Indian users can currently ask Siri to call someone, get directions, play music or check the weather using English mixed with Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Malayalam or Gujarati.
Bilingual Siri arrives with iOS 17
But as reported by TechCrunch, iOS 17 will let people in India mix English and Hindi or English with Telugu, Punjabi, Kannada or Marathi when conversing with and making any type of request to Siri, not just the ones above.
Apple is playing catch-up with this feature because other major assistants have been able to speak two different languages at the same time.
Google Assistant, for example, has been bilingual since 2018, while Amazon launched multilingual support for its Alexa assistant in 2019.
Other improvements for Indian users in iOS 17
TechCrunch has listed a few other improvements and tweaks Apple made to iOS 17 and its other software platforms to improve the experience for Indian users:
- Transliteration support: iOS 17 supports more Indic languages thanks to new transliteration support for Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
- Apple ID sign-ups via phone numbers: In some countries, you can use a phone number instead of your email address as your Apple ID user name. iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma expand this feature to India, allowing folks in the country to use a phone number-based Apple ID.
- Punjabi dictionary: iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma have a new built-in Punjabi dictionary, letting Punjabi speakers get definitions of words and phrases.
- Expanded call history: In India, iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma can now display up to 2,000 recent calls, including FaceTime and VoIP calls via compatible apps like WhatsApp.
- Message filtering on iPad: iPadOS 17 lets Indian users filter messages by known and unknown senders in the Messages app.
Two new Siri features in iOS 17
Still, it’s better late than never. Siri in iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma also bring the shorter “Siri” invocation and back-to-back requests, but that’s about it regarding the Siri improvements in iOS 17.