Intelligence in iOS 9

In WWDC 2015, Craig Federighi announced "Intelligence" in iOS 9. Now iOS 9 will offer personalized content and search results. Siri will be "proactive". You will be able to perform complex searches (in terms of what a machine can understand) on the phone. For example, “Show me photos from my 2014 trip to San Francisco.” "Missed conversation from Tim" etc.

If you have phone number linked with an email, but not stored in your contacts, the iPhone will fetch the data from your email, and display a "Maybe" name.

Smart phones are already a ubiquitous part of modern society. Proactive intelligence will take user experience up a notch. For example, if you check your emails first thing in the morning, your phone will recognize that usage pattern and automatically pop up the mail app when you pick up your phone in the morning. This usage recognition is time, place and device sensitive. So the "proactive" content that you'll get in the gym will be different than that in your kitchen.

Your phone will learn about your usage (and may be your personality) better than anyone else in the world. ;)

When I saw this, my thought was; When I upgrade to iOS 9 the first thing I am going to do, is turn off "proactive" features in the phone. I don't want Apple to collect my personal info and habits; this is way out of my comfort zone to share this personal data with any company. 

But then I was astonished when Craig said...

We do it in a way that does not compromise your privacy. We don't mine your emails, your contacts, your photos in the cloud to learn things about you. We honestly just don't wanna know :) 

All of this is done ON THE DEVICE ! and it stays on the device under YOUR CONTROL.

 

The data mining and analytics are performed on the device itself. Obviously iPhone 6 & 6s are better/stronger/faster by multitudes in their processing power compared to their predecessors. But more than hardware, the software is responsible for this "Intelligence" in iOS 9.

Acquisition of Acunu (startup offering low latency analytics for Cassandra databases) along with Cue (startup offering personalized search engine) might have played key role in making "Intelligence" possible in iOS 9.

Kudos to Apple for bringing "Intelligence" in smart phone without disturbing user privacy.