Apple's iOS 8.3 is launching in spring and a public beta version is said to become available in March. The upcoming version adds support for more languages for Siri. This will include Turkish, Thai, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian and English for India. Various English accents for regions such as New Zealand are also in the pipeline.
Launched in 2011, Siri now supports a number of languages. These include Korean, Italian, Mandarin, French, Spanish, Cantonese and Japanese. It also supports regional English versions in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia.
Users can change the language settings in Siri by going through the Siri settings panel on their Apple devices. However, the update is being pushed solely for beta testers, which means that regular users will not be able to access their device's language settings just yet.
According to the support page on Siri, the language support feature is available in any country. Siri is also designed to understand the country's particular accents and dialects.
"Since every language has its own accents and dialects, the accuracy rate will be higher for native speakers," said Apple.
The ability of Siri to understand a language is based on the way it uses voice recognition algorithms and how often it is exposed to the various accents that the language has. Apple promises to continue improving Siri's recognition capacity when dealing with dialects and accents.
"The more you use Siri, the better it will understand you," said Apple. "Siri uses voice recognition algorithms to categorize your voice into one of the dialects or accents it understands. As more people use Siri and it's exposed to more variations of a language, its overall recognition of dialects and accents will continue to improve."
Apart from the added languages, the iOS 8.3 will also feature a diverse selection of emoji. Users can even change an emoji's skin tone by simply clicking an emoji and holding it.
Other functionalities brought about by the update include Wireless Carplay and enhanced logging.
While no specific date is available for the actual release of Apple's iOS 8.3, a public beta is scheduled to be released in mid-March. Future releases include iOS 8.4 with a new music streaming service and iOS 9 for summer and fall respectively.
