Patent published on September 29, 2014

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Peter was delivering an important presentation and was presenting important points of his project and all of a sudden his phone started ringing.

He forgot to put his iPhone 5s on silent mode today.

Result: Everyone gets distracted and it became embarrassing for him as he had requested everyone to put their phone on silent mode. Importance of silent mode had been learned by Peter again.

Later in the evening, when Peter was driving back to his home he got an email notification on his phone.

The eagerness to see what had come up made him to take out the phone from the pocket and all of this happened while he was driving. He got distracted and was about to hit another car. Fortunately he decelerated at right time.

Sounding familiar? Yeah you can relate with Peter. Every now and then we face such situations where our smartphones put us into dangerous and embarrassing situations.

Apart from this, many a time our phone vibrates or rings when we are studying, or while watching a movie or while we are in library when pin drop silence is expected from everyone. And if you’ve forgotten to silent your Smartphone then you are going to be in trouble.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if your Smartphone could take care of such situations? Like it’s inferring that you are in a library and sending itself to the silent mode?

And guess what Apple is soon coming with iPhone 6 which may have a new feature that can take care of these situations. The name of this new feature will be ‘Quiet hours’ for notifications.

We get to know about it from the patent filings of Apple. You can get an access to the patent application from this link.

This new feature will automatically suppress notifications from smart phone or tablet depending upon the situation you are in. For example, the phone will automatically suppress any notification of call, email or even the light alerts whenever you will be attending a meeting, visiting church, studying or driving a car.

Now you must be thinking that how your smart phone will come to know that you are driving or attending a meeting? Great you are a curious soul and even Peter was asking the same question.

Ok so enough talk. Now that you understand how this new feature works, it’s time to explore each scenario one by one. So here I go.

When you will be busy in a meeting – You can activate the quiet hours for notifications manually (obviously) and in case you have forgotten, your iPhone will check your calendar and determine if you have a meeting scheduled. And at the time of the meeting, the feature will get activated automatically.

in a meeting

When you will be at church – In this scenario, your iPhone will check its location by using GPS and once it has determined that you are in a place where you don’t want disturbance, it will suppress notifications.

When you will be running or driving – This is the best feature mentioned in the patent application. Your iPhone can enable/disable the Quiet hour for notifications by sensing the speed at which it is traveling with you.

For example, if you are moving at a speed of 2 miles per hour, then it will infer that you might be walking and will not suppress the notifications.

However, if you are moving with a speed of 35 miles per hours, then, it will infer that you might be driving and the feature will get activated automatically.

So now Peter won’t be receiving any email notifications while driving.

running-race

When you will be studying or strolling along the lakeside – In some places like in a library and while walking along lakeside, you don’t want any kind of distractions. If a call arrives, you may chose to ignore them or switch off the phone to avoid more calls.

This feature is smart enough to keep a check on these things. It monitors your activities at places where you use to put your phone on silent mode or turn it off repeatedly.

It keeps a check on such places and activates Quiet Hours for Notification feature automatically.

dude-moms-calling

Importance of the important people – Your iPhone understands that there are people with whom you want to connect regardless of your schedule. For example, you parents, wife, girlfriend, your boss or your important client.

You can add these contacts and email addresses into the exceptional list. This is another feature of quiet hours for notification. Whenever they will call or send you an email, you will receive notifications.

Do tell us in comments below what you think about the applications of this new feature.

Also, it takes time to approach a patent application, so the feature might come into iPhone 6s or 7.

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