The mention of Ukrainian language support in Live Text and Voice Over appeared on the official Apple website after the presentation of future OS updates – iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS 13 Ventura.
Voice Over is part of the standard set of accessibility features that Apple, Google, and others are developing to make their products and services as accessible as possible for people with special needs. The VoiceOver gesture-based screen reader lets people with visual impairments use iPhone. It provides audible descriptions of screen content, from battery life and user data during a call to an open app.
As for Live Text OCR, it’s essentially the counterpart to Google’s well-known Lens image recognition technology and one of Apple’s most notable new features – it debuted with iOS 15 and only supported seven languages at first. With the new update, the number of supported languages has grown to ten , including Ukrainian.
In addition, Apple has expanded the capabilities of Live Text – now it works with video. At the same time, thanks to a number of improvements, iOS has also learned to better understand the context of recognition – for example, immediately convert the amount into the desired currency or translate text.
Live Text is supported on iPhone XS, 11, 12, 13, SE 3rd Gen, XR, iPad A12 Bionic and later, and Mac with Apple Silicon.
