iOS 9 & Siri – Here’s how the Intelligent Assistant is Improved

Apple’s WWDC 2015 is the most awaited event for most of the tech enthusiasts, especially to the Apple fanboys. While I may not fall into that category, but I do love to see what Apple has in store for its users. With the introduction of iOS 9, the Cupertino giant welcomed tons of new and improved features on its next generation operating system.

With the new update, Siri can help you navigating to your desired location by giving you transit directions. This Maps app comes under OS X too. Therefore it allows you to plan a trip on your Mac, and then later you can see the route on your iPhone, or even an Apple Watch. Sounds interesting, right!

Search for photos from your last trip

Siri can now search through your photos and videos based on dates, locations, as well as album titles. For instance, you wanted to see the photos from your trip last year, and then all you have to do was tell Siri, “Show me photos from my trip in December last year”, and it will show you exactly what you’re looking for. As well as you can trigger the location based reminders like, remind yourself about this when I get to my car.

Moreover, it can also act as a reminder of things that you search for in apps like, Mail, Safari, and Notes. For instance, if you’re going through your emails and want Siri to remind you about the dinner date tonight, then you just have to say, “Remind me about the dinner date tonight.” As well as you can ask for location based reminders too.

Proactive Feature

The proactive feature of Siri is the new addition that is going to help it to pull up such specific data. Previously, you can ask for basic things like what’s the weather and all. But with personal assistance like Cortana and Google Now showing what can be done with such information at hand. It is obvious that this would require Siri access to your contents.

Although, unlike Google Now, which uses cloud data to remind you and share with you the latest happening related to your search interests. Siri would store all the data on the device itself, which according to the company is more secure than storing it on a Cloud. So, that you would be in total control of the way you look for content. The proactivity is done on Siri, and it would be free from identifiers, as well as not link any Apple ID or services, therefore maintaining the anonymity.

The proactive part would reside on the side of the home screen and would be available with a swipe. All the relevant information would be mined here just when a user would need it. It can even pull information from searches as well as third-party apps since Apple has included a search API.

Bringing relevant content to the home screen of their users is something Google Now has been doing for a quite a time now, which was later followed by Microsoft’s Cortana. Now that Apple has also implemented this, it is clear that content is still a king and the companies striving to offer a more relevant information to its users would profit from that.