Siri To Support Multi Lingual Translation In iOS 11

Apple has rolled out four developer betas and three public betas for iOS 11 so far. As a matter of fact, iOS 11 was first unveiled by Apple at its annual WWDC conference in June this year along with the other major OS updates like macOS 10.13 High Sierra, WatchOS 4 and new Macbook Pro models. And although no date has been finalized yet, Apple is going to launch this in autumn, most probably in the month of September.

As the release of iOS 11 is approaching, new features of the latter are coming into picture. As it turns out, Siri is also going to receive a sizable makeover with the iOS 11 release as it’s got an ace up its sleeve. For the first time, Apple has added multi-lingual features to its so called personal assistant. You can now ask Siri to translate a word, sentence or phrase into one of the supported languages. Siri currently supports six languages including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Mandarin while it may add other languages as well in the near future.

You may also like How To Install iOS 11 Public Beta On Compatible iDevices.

How It Works?

Using Siri in iOS 11 is as simple as it’s always been. You can simply ask Siri to translate a word, phrase or sentence for you and it’ll do that right away. Note that at present, you can only use Siri to translate from English to other languages and not the other way around. However, it is also possible that Apple may enable the reverse functionality by seeding a number of incremental updates.

As usual, you can start by pressing and holding the home button and after Siri has been invoked, simply ask “How do I say [word/phrase/sentence] in [language].” For example, if you want to translate ‘Hello’ into French, just ask Siri “How do I say Hello in French?” Doing that, it will display the translation on screen and also speak that aloud. This feature is especially helpful when you are in a foreign country and facing problems while speaking in the native language.  

This feature is currently in beta stage, so you may encounter several glitches. Also, make sure that you have set ‘US English’ as the language for Siri or else, it just won’t work.

How To Use The Translate Feature Without Voice?

Well of course, you don’t necessarily have to speak every time you want Siri to do something for you. You can also type in to say whatever you want Siri to do. You can do so by enabling the Type to Siri option in Settings. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Siri and turn on “Type to Siri.”

Once you have Type to Siri enabled on your device, you can give text commands to Siri instead of voicing them. However, Siri will still reply in voice even after you have turned this feature ‘on.’ Thankfully, you can fix that as well. Just go to Settings > Siri > Voice Feedback and turn on Control with Ring Switch.