Race to Have Siri in Other Apple Devices: Has Anybody Found Success?
Siri, the artificially intelligent voice-recognition system is one of the highlights of the recently released iPhone 4S. This feature has received positive responses among users and most of them are also expressing their desire to integrate Siri with other iOS devices.
Many users have demanded that they wanted Siri to be available in other Apple devices such as iPhone 4, iPad, and MacBooks. Several hackers and developers are already working in order for Siri to be available to other people and they are in fact getting close to making this attempt to work. One group dubbed as the iPhone Dev Team shared the group's attempts to hack an iPhone 4 and 4th-gen iPod touch in order to install and run Siri but in order to do so, the group needed to do it in a jailbroken device. Steve Troughton-Smith, one of the members of the group said that this was possible through "writing one line of code and to make a lot of filesystem changes". He also explained the process by stating that "It does require files from an iPhone 4S which aren't ours to distribute, and it also requires a validation token from the iPhone 4S that has to be pulled live from a jailbroken iPhone 4S, and it's about a 20-step process right now." The group's hack methods are not yet released publicly because the team wanted to make sure that their hack method would be safe and would not have any bad effect in iDevice parts.
Presently, the most successful attempt to make Siri available for other Apple devices aside from iPhone 4S would the one done by the developers of Applidium. The group was able to access Siri without the need to jailbreak the iOS device. They were able to do this through reversing the process the way Siri communicates with Apple servers. They used this to sign a certificate for a fake site, "guzzoni.apple.com." Afterwards, the group decoded a bunch of binary which enabled them to better understand how Siri works. Siri works through sending a lot of communication data back and forth from Apple's servers and the Apple servers would reply with a confidence score and a timestamp of each word that the user has spoken. The group revealed that they developed this method in a span of two weeks.
There are many reasons why Siri was only launched in iPhone 4S and not for all iOS devices. One of which is that Siri only works when it is backed up with a lot of processing power. The other iDevice which shares the same 1GHz dual-core processor is Apple's iPad 2. Aside from processor requirements, Siri also requires an "always-on-data" connection. All iPad 2 WiFi-only models can't guarantee this kind of connection. Another important factor for Siri is the device's microphone. In order for Siri to hear the user's voice, the microphone location and sensitivity should be placed strategically-something that other Apple devices needs to improve on.
Presently, Apple has no official plans regarding the future of Siri for other iOS devices. Apple's engineers responded towards this topic in a statement through CNET stating that "Siri only works on iPhone 4S and we currently have no plans to support older devices."