Phone 5 'Assistant' Detailed

Earlier today, it was revealed (though not confirmed by Apple) that the next-generation iPhone 5 will ship with a ton of enhancements, in terms of both hardware and software.

Described as “the biggest game changer” in the iPhone to come, a Siri-based Assistant utility will be implemented system-wide in iOS 5 and it will only be functional on high-specced iPhone 5 devices.

This is because the feature requires the dual-core A5 SOC (system on a chip) and additional RAM. According to the report in question, Apple’s iPhone 5 will ship with 1GB of RAM (double the memory of the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4).

So, how does Assistant work? In a nutshell, it just listens to what you have to say and it delivers.

For example, you can just text-message one of your friends by telling your iPhone to “send a text to Anna saying I’ll be there at eight”.

The phone will automatically send the SMS, but only if you haven’t set it up to verify the text before sending it off.

In conversation view, Assistant can speak back to the user, as if it were a real person.

A user looking to start a meeting with their friend John, for example, will say “setup meeting with John” and the first “bubble” of the conversation thread will reflect those words in writing.

The system will then speak back, asking: “which e-mail address should Mark be notified at, work or personal?” The question will both be spoken and shown as a new bubble in the conversation, according to 9to5mac.

Assistant will integrate with numerous other iOS services, like the Calendar app, for example. Just say “make appointment with John for 10:30 AM” and Assistant will instantly create that appointment in your calendar.

Assistant has integration with one unconfirmed feature (until now) called Find My Friends. Users will simply ask the location of one of their friends and, provided that said friend doesn’t care much about their privacy, Assistant will indulge.

Finally, according to the leak, Assistant integrates with Wolfram Alpha, the powerful the online answer engine designed by Wolfram Research to answer factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages relevant to the query.

Those who have been able to field test the feature are suggesting it’s so reliable that you can ask pretty much anything and you’ll get a satisfying answer.

How do you like the sound of Assistant in Apple's next iPhone?

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