No, talking to other humans is over and if it's not a technological solution with zero human feedback, it's not a solution I could build a VC-funded startup on, so obviously not a solution in real-life.
I don't see why Android or iOS couldn't enable location based DnD at certain locations. Of course make it optional, but they already have your location and know that the place you are at is an Opera house, theater, etc...
So, Android formerly offered geofenced "Rules" for DND, and even flexible "Modes". You could set a location, or a WiFi network, and a radius slider to set the distance from that location or network. But the geolocation features have been removed. The Modes functionality is still available, but you're only allowed to configure time-based schedules or calendar events for triggering them.
Just before they were removed, I decided to eliminate all of my Rules and Modes entirely, because they were turning out to be extremely unreliable, and there was a bug whereby the Pixel went back into DND mode after a restart, even when it had already been moved outside of the location. It was also quite unpredictable how any Mode would behave, when there were all kinds of settings for each one, and it was just too much to set up and keep track of.
Today, DND is even more onerous. In the Clock app's Alarms tab, if DND is enabled, the app prevents me from editing or deleting or modifying, in any way, the alarms as they are set. This is terrible. You see, Google really, really wants us to disable DND and keep it off forever. DND is very bad for Android. So they are making it as inconvenient as all-get-out to leave DND enabled. If it were up to me, I'd leave it defaulted to "on" until I wanted to be disturbed.
My experience with DnD has been that it pretty much just works how I want it to. DnD from 10 PM to 8 AM, only certain people can reach me via call or text, alarms break through it. Never had any buggy behior setting, editing, or deleting alarms.
No thanks. "I tried to reach you yesterday". "Oh sorry, I happened to walk by an opera house." PLEASE, less, not more automatisms. Everything has a tendency to produce false positives.
> "Oh sorry, I happened to walk by an opera house."
It would be unfortunate for them to phone you precisely in the small period where DND was turned on as you walked past the opera house (even a large one would be, what, under two minutes of walking?) and not try you again.
(Because if you have instant location-based DND, yes, it might turn on as you walk by an opera house but equally it would turn off when you were past the opera house. Normally, though, I'd expect location-based DND to only kick in after a certain period of time in the same location - say 10 minutes.)
Sure, the coffee shop might be a problem (since I'm guessing that'd be more than 10 minutes.) You could always turn it off (and a smart system wouldn't turn it back on 10 minutes later unless you leave and come back.)
Apple and Google know the geolocation of every WiFi network in the US at this point. They could use signal strength as an additional measure if GPS is not accurate enough (though I'm pretty sure it is).
