Australia Is Set on Stronger Education Ties with Cambodia through Scholarships, Partnerships - July 13, 2026 , 11:50 AM PHNOM PENH – An expert has urged Cambodians to report a long-standing issue to Apple after users found that Khmer text copied from images is converted into Thai characters when pasted into documents. Chy Sophat, an information technology expert specializing in digital security, said that although Apple has improved the appearance of Khmer script, it has not resolved a problem in its character recognition (OCR) feature on macOS, iPadOS and iOS. “When you copy Khmer text from an image using OCR and paste it into a document, those Khmer characters are converted into Thai characters,” he said. Sophat said this issue remains a concern. He has reported the problem to Apple in the hope that it will be fixed in future updates. He also shares the issue on social media to raise awareness among Cambodians and encourage them to report to Apple to improve its Khmer language support. Under his Facebook post, Apple users also comment that they face the same problem from the previous iOS versions to the latest iOS update. Two years ago, Sophat also raised concern. Now, he hopes Cambodians will work together to report and let the company recognize this issue. System Has Limited Capacity Two key barriers that can prevent technology companies’ systems and artificial intelligence (AI) from perfectly using the Khmer language are the late entry of the Khmer language into the digital space and the limited availability of Khmer language text-based articles, according to Sophat. “It has many barriers. It is the digital era, and we (Cambodia) cannot catch up with the technology. For example, new technologies cannot include the Khmer language on time,” he said. The other challenge is the limited availability of