From Smartphones to Intelligent phones

Couple of months back, my good friend and a UI Designer Soumya, jumped with joy to see Google identifying locations on his Android phones as home and office. He did not recall if he has mentioned or marked these but Google Now did it nevertheless. We looked at each other and smiled.

It brought back memories of a discussion few years back when I was excited about a particular idea so much that was almost considering starting up again.

The idea was simple – Smartphones need to become intelligent. Smartness is about being able to do many things, efficiently, faster etc. Intelligence is about understanding, adapting and helping proactively. Cover is an excellent example of this.

And why is intelligence possible ? It is possible simply because phones are much more powerful today and cloud allows you to do heavy-lifting of data and number-crunching required for it. And also we are seeing increasingly more input of data type from our handhelds.

Considering now we have these following data to work on at our disposal -

1. Location
2. Time
3. Events – ( Calls, Picture taken, SMS sent, Any other App usage )
4. Usage of Bluetooth ( with the type of device used for )
5. Usage of Wifi ( With which networks we are connecting with )
6. Orientation
7. Health information from wearable devices
8. Biometric information in future

Location and time itself can reveal tremendous amount of information about a person.

Careful mapping and extrapolation can help the device to figure out a person’s home, office, route to work, friend’s place, gym, shopping centre etc.

And on top of this if you keep crunching information of usage patterns there can be intelligent responsiveness that can be built into the system.

For example, if in office I do not pick any call from an unknown number, then by default my intelligent phone will not disturb me with unknown phone calls, however since it has seen that I do not ignore call from my family members it would activate the ringer and let me know.

Well this is just one such use-case , but what is exciting is that as you go ahead with more data points to work with, your phone would develop a unique intelligence very contextual to you. The big question in the end, will that knowledge be a part of you, the OS provider or the device is yet to be answered.