Apple's Siri Speaks Also on iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G

The end of Siri's exclusivity on the iPhone 4S may be near. No, I'm not talking about Siri running on the purported Apple television set, but Siri on jailbroken iPhone 4 and -- possibly -- 3GS handsets.

Ireland-based hacker Steve Troughton-Smith and his San Francisco-based comrade Grant Paul (no relation to the author) over the weekend claimed they got Apple's voice-enabled digital assistant functioning properly on an iPhone 4 and a fourth generation iPod Touch. 

The pair solved the problem using Troughton-Smith's code for the Siri port developed earlier this month, as well as software authentication tokens from a jailbroken iPhone 4S. Screenshots of the hack were posted to Twitter as well as two YouTube videos demonstrating the Siri port, one of which was given exclusively to 9-to5 Mac.  

"I've tested pretty much every type of interaction you can make with [Siri on the iPhone 4]," Troughton-Smith told PCWorld in an interview via instant messenger. "It works just as well as the iPhone 4S, and I've seen it work even faster than it at times." The only feature that doesn't work, according to Troughton-Smith, is the iPhone 4S's so-called "raise to speak" feature that allows you to activate Siri's voice-command interface by raising the phone to your ear. The problem with raise to speak on Siri, Troughton-Smith says, is that it requires the new gyroscope in the 4S; it's not clear whether this could be solved. Google offers a similar raise to speak feature in its search application for iOS devices, including the iPhone 4 and 3GS.  

Apple's Server Conundrum

   

Hackers have been trying to get Siri to work on iOS devices other than the iPhone 4S for several weeks now. But until the recent breakthrough, they had only the interface functioning while Siri voice commands on the iPhone 4 went unheeded. Siri relies on Apple's servers to do all the heavy duty processing of voice commands, and hackers hadn't yet figure out how to trick Apple into believing an iPhone 4 was actually an iPhone 4S. This problem, it appears, has now been solved.

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