Since the unveiling of Siri back in October, users have been waiting for it to be ported to older devices. Siri has since remained exclusive to the iPhone 4S, but chpwn, the famous dev, has now released the first legal Siri port!
This Siri port, dubbed Spire, is available free of cost on Cydia right now. Although legal, it can only be installed on jailbroken phones. You will also require your own Siri proxy setup, and an iPhone 4S for authentication, if you wish to port Siri to your device.
Previous Siri ports such as H1Siri were not only illegal but were also full of bugs, and likely to break your phone. However, Spire is completely legal as it cleverly downloads Siri directly from Apple. However, there is the problem of needing your own proxy setup. Chpwn has a few suggestions to help you obtain exactly what you need:
- 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.
To install, search for Spire on Cydia. The file is around a 100 MBs in size, so you might want to install it over Wi-Fi, like the developer himself suggests. Please note that you will need a jailbroken device, alongside the other requirements. Jailbreak iOS 5 using Redsn0w, or use Sn0wbreeze on Windows.
Since the iOS 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak is out, you can jailbreak your device using that and install Siri.
Although Spire certainly provides hope that Siri be used on older iDevices, it may not be very practical. Only a certain group of people with both jailbroken devices and access to a Siri proxy will be able to enjoy it. However, it sure is a good step towards legal Siri porting.
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