Silence unknown callers automatically:
Maybe you’re in a meeting or simply enjoying dinner with family and don’t want to be disturbed by spam callers.
But you don’t want to miss calls from known contacts either. What do you do? There are call filtering applications like TrueCaller which can help.
If you don’t want to download apps unnecessarily, the iPhone has an in-built feature that silences unknown callers and rings aloud when someone you know calls.
Just in case you’ve called someone recently but haven’t stored their number, the call they’re returning to you will ring loudly too.
Basically, this functions allows you to silence your iPhone without switching on Do Not Disturb (DND) or Silent mode.
Turning on DND stops anyone not on your favorites list from being able to connect to your number.
Silent mode prevents you from receiving alerts even when known contacts call. So silencing calls from strange numbers serves as an in-between.
To enable it, tap Settings > Phone > Silence Unknown Callers and toggle it on.
Translate in real time:
Imagine you’re in a foreign country and cannot speak the language. You cannot read the street signs or signboards, nor can anyone understand what you’re saying.
Apple has a wonderfully comprehensive Translate app which enables live translations between several languages including English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Russian.
The company’s aim was to have an in-built tool that allows users to easily communicate with others in a foreign language.
This translation tool is usable when you’re offline and don’t have an Internet connection too, if you’ve already downloaded the available languages.
As soon as you open the app, you’re greeted with a mic icon as well as an option to type text. You can choose the language you want to enter and the output language — let’s take English to French, for example.
Then all you have to do is type in your query or tap to speak into the microphone. Whatever you input will be translated into French.
You can press the mic button when the person you’re speaking to replies in French in order to get a text or voice translation of their answer.
If you click “Conversation” at the bottom of the screen, it will pull an option to display the contents of the screen in two ways, depending on whether the person you’re conversing with is sitting across you or beside you.
The app also lets you take a picture of anything (like a signboard) written in one language and translates it into another language of your choice.
You don’t even need to click a photo, you can just view the translation live by tapping the round button that appears below the frame.
Alternately, if you have a snap with text in it in your Album, you can open that in the Translate app and have it tell you what the words mean.
Never be embarrassed of ordering aloud in a native French restaurant again when you can let Siri do it for you.
This is the world we eventually want to live in, isn’t it? A place in which people can seamlessly communicate with one another without needing to learn a universal language.