14 DAY TRIAL // A hacker named Pete and going by the name of plamoni on Twitter has picked up where Applidium left off and created a dedicated proxy server for Siri that allows you to speak out custom commands that Siri will understand and even act on.
Applidium is a team of France-based developers who messed around with the code inside Apple’s iOS and managed break Siri’s protocol and ported it to a desktop computer.
They also got the assistant to contact Apple’s servers and work properly, as it would on the iPhone 4S (currently the only device that supports Siri officially).
Siri, for those who don’t read the tech news, is a personal assistant app inside iOS 5 that does all kinds of things for you just by asking it with your voice. Though Siri learns new stuff every day, its request definitions are limited.
Well, they were limited until Pete became intrigued by Applidium’s achievement and picked up on the tools they wrote to help devs understand the protocol.
He has since come up with a Siri Proxy server that enabled him to talk to his WiFi thermostat, check on its status, and even set the temperature inside the house - video demonstration embedded below the article.
He clarifies for the iOS community that his hack doesn't require a jailbroken iPhone. Pete’s comment, posted on iPhoneHacks, is reproduced below:
“I’m the creator of this particular hack, and I can assure you, it doesn’t require the iPhone to be jailbroken. My iPhone 4S is not jailbroken. The only action I needed to take on my iPhone was to install my fake Root CA. Which you can do without jailbreaking. Everything else is done outside of the phone, so it requires no jailbreaking or code to be placed on the phone itself.”
He also stressed that this hack doesn’t open Siri to older-generation devices, such as iPhone 3GS or even iPhone 4. This account was found on the FAQ section of the SiriProxy project page on GitHub:
"Short answer: No.
Longer answer: While this doesn't let you do such a thing, it could HELP with such a thing. For instance, if you get Siri installed on your iPhone 4 (don't ask me how to do this, I really don't know), and you get someone to give you a valid iPhone 4S UDID (don't ask me for mine, I will ignore your request), you could use this proxy in order to substitute the valid UDID for your device's invalid UDID. It would be pretty trivial. Of course, that would allow anyone with access to the proxy use your UDID, so I'd recommend against that sort of action on anything externally accessible without performing some sort of authentication (might I suggest, checking the phone's UDID? hehe)."
This is pretty much what Applidium said about enabling Siri on older devices. In all senses, it appears that everyone is afraid of crossing Apple on this one.
