Making Multitasking Easier, Cydia Tweak HiddenHelper Launches Siri In The Background

Siri is perhaps one of the most popular things about the iPhone 4S. With iOS 6, it will be coming to the new iPad as well (3^rd gen) ending it’s exclusivity to the latest iPhone.

Even though Siri is immensely popular amongst iOS users, this does not mean that there is no room for improvement. iOS 6 has brought a lot of changes in Siri. However, iOS 6 won’t be available to everyone till autumn. For now, what current Siri users can do to make Siri cooler is turn to Cydia. A tweak from Cydia that stands out from the rest and makes the Siri experience a lot cooler is HiddenHelper. To enhance talking to Siri and making it feel more natural than it does right now, this useful tweak lets you talk to it without launching its interface.

This means that your iDevice’s screen will remain unchanged while you ask Siri for an answer and while Siri answers. Thanks to HiddenHelper, it will actually feel more like you’re interacting with your phone and less like with an app. As for answers that require text or graphical support, you can change the settings and choose exactly what should and should not be displayed.

The Settings menu of HiddenHelper has two sections. The first simply enables disabling/enabling of the tweak itself. The second section is far more interesting and has a lot of options. These options allow the user to decide when they would prefer the Siri interface to be shown and when they’ll want it hidden.

The list of options for which you can choose whether HiddenHelper should show the Siri UI or not is as follows:

• Wolfram Alpha Answers
• Messages
• Notes
• Alarm
• Timer
• Stocks
• Weather
• Mail
• Reminders
• Clock/ Time

Obviously, you’ll want to turn the visibility on for things like weather and Wolfram Alpha answers, as these rely on graphical or text support. For others, such as when you want to know the time, you can turn Siri’s interface visibility off. When you ask Siri the time, you will be told but without Siri’s interface popping up – you’ll only hear the activation sound.

This tweak will prove to be useful for people who don’t like Siri’s UI popping up when they ask a question and especially don’t like interruptions while already using some other app simply to use Siri. Grab this tweak from Cydia’s ModMyI repo for free!

[Via]