Apple, at WWDC 2015 has announced the “Proactive Assistant” a new updated Siri, which is a blend of a digital assistant with services such as Calendar, Maps and Spotlight. It will be launched with iOS 9 to give cut throat competition to Google’s Digital assistant – Google Now.

The Proactive Siri’s main objective is to make the user’s life easy by anticipating which app they want to open based on the context of time, geographical locations depending on their previous activities done at that time or location.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering said, “When a user performs a search, we can find content behind the apps they have on their device, and when they tap they’re deep-linked into the app.”

The new Proactive Assistant will use the Calendar App to give reminders to the users to leave on time based on traffic. Siri can now search the Mail App for contact information and display the name of the callers automatically, even if they are not saved in the phonebook.

Siri’s intelligence was displayed in a demo that showed how when a person was viewing an incoming message from a friend that asks to pick something up; it lets the user easily add a reminder by saying ‘Remind me about this later today’.

Also, Natural language can now be understood by Siri, it was demonstrated when Federighi said “Show me photos from Utah from last August.” and Apple’s Proactive Assistant displayed a set of photos geo tagged to Utah in August 2014.

Proactive will be available on the left side of the home screen with a simple swipe and will be aware of all our activities at all time. A new search API has also been included by Apple that can fetch information even from third-party apps. All the data with the proactive assistant stays anonymous
on your device and not the cloud, so don’t worry about your privacy.