iPhone 5 To Include New iOS 5 “Assistant” Voice Feature

9to5Mac reveals features of the "Assistant" voice-powered personal application that will appear on the next-generation iPhone. The site claims that Assistant allows users to handle scheduling, reminder, and messaging tasks by voice. The system will be also capable to ask user questions to clarify what is being said.

The system will actually speak back and forth with the user to gain the most information in order to provide the best results. The user essentially can hold a conversation with their iPhone like it is another human being. For example, if a user is making a meeting with me, they will say “setup meeting with Mark” and the first “bubble” of the conversation thread will say that. After that, the system will speak back: “which e-mail address should Mark be notified at, work or personal?” This question will both be spoken out loud by the iPhone Assistant and shown as a new “bubble” in the conversation thread. The user will then respond with the email address they want to notify me at, and the appointment will be made. The iPhone will even show a quick glance at a calendar view to confirm the appointment. If the Assistant was sending an SMS, as another example, a mini SMS view would appear so the user has a quick glance at the SMS thread.

Assistant will also integrate with WolframAlpha that will help users receive answers to factual, and  "Find My Friends" service and speech-to-text transcription from Nuance. Of course, such power-consuming application will require more powerful hardware, suggesting that Apple will integrate  A5 chip and RAM to 1 GB to support the heavy workload into the new iPhone.