Apple introduces bilingual Siri and a full screenshot feature with iOS 17

Image credits: apple

Apple released its first set of public betas 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 Indian languages. This means that users will be able to ask Siri queries by mixing English and Hindi languages. In addition, users can mix English with Telegu, Punjabi, Kannada or Marathi. Apple was late to the game as the Google Assitant got multilingual support in 2018 and Amazon launched multilingual support in 2019. This is especially useful for users based in India as they speak a mixture of languages ​​in daily conversations.

Apple is also bringing a full-page screenshot feature to iOS 17 — something Android phones have been offering with “scrolling screenshots” for years now. Users can save this as an image or a PDF.

Users get better dual SIM support with sorting messages for each SIM, separate ringtones for each SIM, and the ability to choose the SIM when calling back from an unknown number.

Apple announced some 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 Indian languages.
• Users can sign in to their Apple ID with their phone number instead of their email ID on iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma.
• New built-in Punjabi dictionary for definition of words and phrases across platforms.
• Users will be able to see up to 2000 calls in the Call History section including Facetime and WhatsApp calls.
• Filter 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 betas are expected to contain some bugs, so if you don’t want to install it on your main device, you can wait for the final public release.