This is all well and good, but remove your finger from the display for more than a split second while you’re in the middle of sketching and yes, your half-finished effort still flies over to the translation box. When you finish sketching out a foreign character using the app, it flies off to the translation box. The good news is that for simpler characters it seems to work pretty well. Best tap on the app’s microphone icon for that and ask the waiting staff for clarification. However, if you’re in somewhere like China and find yourself wondering if the ultra-complicated kanji character on a restaurant menu refers to a part of an animal’s anatomy that you’d rather not put in your mouth, good luck with drawing it on your smartphone screen with your finger.
The new handwriting feature, which currently supports 49 languages, has been available to Android users of the app for well over a year and will supposedly come in handy if you don’t know how to say the word you want translated, or if you’re unable to type it. How to turn off your iPhone 14 Pro’s always-on display How to turn a Live Photo into a video on your iPhone How to download the iPadOS 17 beta on your iPad right now
