Just yesterday, we told you about a project named “i4Siri” on which developers were working to port Siri to non-iPhone 4S devices. But according to one of the developers, Siri has been successfully ported to iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch and iPad 1. Not only that, it has also been legally released for jailbreakers in the form of a tweak named Spire. But it is not as easy as just downloading a Cydia tweak. Keep reading for more info.
Chpwn, the hacker working hard on the Siri-port project, has finally succeeded in it. And as he promised, the Siri for A4 chip devices is now available for free on Cydia in the form of a tweak named Spire. The good thing is that you don’t have to add a custom repo to get it, as it is available in the default BigBoss repo.
And as we mentioned above, it is not easy as just downloading a tweak as Spire is not yet smooth enough to do all the work by itself. For instance, you would need an iPhone 4S for authentication to get it running on your older-gen iOS device.
Chpwn explained it on his blog,
However, Spire is not a complete solution. Apple still requires authorization to use Siri, so information from an iPhone 4S is still required. To insert this information, Spire allows you to enter your own proxy server address. I’ve put up a list of my ideas on how you might get access to a proxy; hopefully you can figure something out.
And the only way to get Siri proxy, as suggested by chpwn is to first download Spire for the device you want Siri on, via Cydia by just searching for “Spire” and then,
- westbaer’s SiriProxy fork
- Own an iPhone 4S too: Maybe you already own an iPhone 4S, and just want Siri on another device of yours. This is simple; you can just use the above proxy yourself.
- Find a friend: Maybe your friend has an iPhone 4S and will let you use their authentication tokens (maybe in exchange for some cool SiriProxy plugins). Then, you can share the authentication. Or, maybe you gave your relative your old iPhone when you got your iPhone 4S: now you can share your token and give them Siri.
- Pay up: It’s very likely that soon we will see for-pay services online to rent you some space on a Siri proxy, attached to one of their iPhone 4S devices. I haven’t seen anything like this yet, but I’ll keep my eye out, and I would encourage anyone who is interested to set something like this up.
- And now for something completely different: As I suggested earlier, you might be able to replace Siri entirely. A simple method might be to use Google Chrome’s speech “API” hooked up to some code to decode the Siri requests and parse Google’s result. Or, someone could hook it up to some logic backends like many of the clones available on Android: the possibilities are endless.
But note that your device must be jailbroken in order to port Cydia on your device.