Scribble in Thai on iPadOS 16

Wednesday, 8 June 2022

As I mentioned in my WWDC 2022 reactions post on Monday, one surprise feature for iPadOS 16 is Scribble in Thai. Strangely there is no mention of this anywhere on the feature list page and only shown briefly on the feature tiles slide at the end of the iPadOS section in the keynote.

I would not have guessed Thai to be the third script to gain support after Latin and Chinese. There are so many other scripts that would have gotten more use by way more people like Arabic or Devanagari. Why Thai? I don’t get it but I’m certainly happy to see it.

I decided to live dangerously and installed iPadOS 16 developer beta 1 so that I could try this out.

Animated GIF of the Try Scribble

I’m super impressed at how well it could detect and convert my chicken scratch handwriting.

Animated GIF of the scribble saying 'Hello WWDC' in Thai — "Hello WWDC!"

Animated GIF of the scribble saying my full name in Thai — It even got my Thai name correctly, except the space

This is not the only Thai-related new feature this year. The Translate app now supports Thai, which means Safari web page and system-wide translation support!

Added support for Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish, Indonesian, and Dutch in Safari web page translation.

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The Translate app and system‑wide translation add support for Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish, Indonesian, and Dutch.