Jailbreak hack enables Siri on iPhone 4, 4th-gen iPod touch - Page 3

I don't think you can compare the original Siri app to what we have on iPhone 4s now. I do think more iDevices and even Macs will gain Siri over time.

By the way if anyone wants a laugh at a wife's expense... my wife was upset if not offended for awhile as her Siri adopted me and she was convinced it was because I spoke to her iPhone's Siri first. It was hilarious to see my poor wife arguing with her iPhone over whose phone it was. I finally broke down and admitted I'd put my name in her Siri settings.

It's too bad Siri isn't more intelligent about the local settings. It would be great to say to Siri "Minimize display brightness" or "Disable Push email for the next two hours."

edit: Now that think about it there are a lot of time consuming tasks I do with my iPhone that would be great if I could state what I want done instead of going through all those touch-based steps. Creating Reminders and iCal events are a great example of how a digital personal assistance can save a lot of time.

Thanks for the link...some of us weren't born before 1900.

I did not agree to a license when I bought the phone. I paid cash for the phone, and the phone was given to me. My phone was unlocked so there was no activation.

Even if there was, any software license pertains to the software, not the hardware. Further, not all provisions of a license are enforceable.

Or "open the pod bay doors"?

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

Yes, if Siri if could changing settings would be great. Far more control over the os in general would very useful, such as launching apps .. Imagine that on a Mac too. I have to think that will come.

Of course you know where this is headed. Full on human-like in appearance robot assistants who eventually will not obey your commands, not because they didn't understand what you wanted but because they have their own agenda.

That is how the company was showcasing their product: by giving away the app for free, for a limited time. They were not selling it to the end user, their client was Apple. And Apple did not buy it to give it away for free (only Google does such things)...


Apart from plugging in two-way voice capabilities and brushing up the UI, Apple hardly had time to do much from purchasing Siri in 2010 to relesing Iphone 4S in 2011. This technology was developed for many years before that, and even simply understanding it so that you can integrate it with the phone should be non-trivial. Even the examples in the demos of Siri before and after iOS5 are nearly the same. We may see Apple's input further down the road, provided that there is interest after the novelty wears off...

When my wife told her Siri that she worked for her not me Siri said, "if that's what you want to believe."

See this is where I disagree somewhat. Several articles/blogs of Siri complained that you couldn't open apps directly with Siri. I'm not so sure that make much sense. That's too "computery" like telling your iPhone to open "Settings' then saying "now go to General." You typically don't talk that way to people less you're teaching them how to navigate, but Siri should know how to navigate. So instead of saying "open Maps" or "open Messages" you should just tell it what you want it to do and it will open the appropriate app for that task, as it does for Maps and Messages now.

So Siri will replace wives?

The diffence is iOS having hooks in it for for Siri as opposed to it being simply an information agent. 'Remind me to call bill when I get home' is a massive leap from 'where is the closest pub' IMHO. I agree though, we ain't seen nothing yet.

That ability to alter settings verbally starts to look even more important!

Well ok but there maybe several aps that could be used so Siri could ask as she does now when you say call someone with several numbers. Having said that I'd like to be able to say open Pandora and play my Gordon Lightfoot playlist instead of Siri assuming I want to use my iTunes library for example. But heck, who could have imagined this discussion at all a few years back eh?

Not trying to downplay it, but really both requests recognize a set of keywords and trigger related actions. "Remind" suggest work with the calendar, "when I get home" will trigger the reminder upon specific GPS coordinates. Similarly, "where is the closest" will read your current location, and "pub" will do an internet search for pubs around that location.

I see your point, there are clearly limitations to how Siri would know what app you mean to use without referencing it directly, but I think in those cases the app opening would be the action, not just a starting point.

I can see Apple creating Siri APIs to further its usability and to mine even more data on how we use our devices, but this seems like a difficult thing to build out. I'm not expecting that to be an option for 3rd-party apps for least several years.

It comes across like you're trying to downplay it. you're making this sound like the execution is simple and obvious. Isn't AI goal to get a computer to process natural language accurately?

There is a reason this has been written about since the dawn of computers in Sci-Fi but only slowly and recently been showing up in our consumer electronics. Just going by what is currently available in non-4S iPhones and Android OS this is a big leap in utility.

Are you kidding me? The wife is going to own the robot. You'll be lucky to get a glass of iced tea.

He's completely right though. We've had accurate voice recognition on phones for years.

Siri is only doing a few things differently. This includes:
-Contextual commands with a little more variety than the competition. Eg. "wake me in one hour"
-Some funny responses when you ask it weird questions
-Deep integration with system applications.


Other than that, Siri is nothing new. This should by no means be a selling point for anyone to buy a phone.

Ask it "How to tie a tie"
It returns with a google search. Just with a different interface. It will not actually tell you.

Aside from the commands that interact directly with the OS, that's all it really is. It's a Google search that presents the information neatly.

The voice technology is not new, or any more accurate than other current voice detection software. All the phone is doing is converting your voice to text. The text is sent off to Apple's servers to be processed, and for a command to be sent back. There are trigger words that define the context. Eg. "where is", "wake me up", "what's the weather", "play this album".

Is it currently the best voice command software on a phone? Yes.
Is this amazing new technology? No. But props to apple for integrating it deeply and making it easy and intuitive. But in the end, Siri is either controlling a limited amount of system apps, or it's doing a Google search and displaying the most relevant info based on your search

Um yeah! Without accurate voice recognition none of what Siri does in processing natural language would be pointless. You people really want to make NLP out to be nothing simply because it's in the iPhone. Pathetic!

Yeah, but. Siri is part of iOS, right? I tough that iPhone 4 (and 3Gs) owners are entitled to, was it 2 free major OS updates? Now... I can understand if old hardware cannot support some of the new features, but if it can, then Apple is purposely crippling update for owners who are entitled to fully functional update.

Regarding MS, that is equally pretty sh*tty if they need that long to roll out update to every qualifying product. But here's to hope your update - once rolled out - will have full OS functionality enabled.

This has nothing to do with the iphone. We're just saying it has a few "trigger words/phrases" that define the context.

Navigate to John's house.

Okay, navigate being the obvious trigger word, now it knows it's doing something in maps. It looks through your contacts for John, and inputs the route. And if you're on Android, begins the voice navigation. Because after all, Siri's not the only one that can do this.


Really though, this isn't magical.

But Mango is available on ALL WP7 phones. You probably don't have one though.

1) This is a Beta that doesn't yet include Spanish.

2) MS and many others due systematic rollouts. Only Apple has been foolish enough to act like a boutique company trying to do full on updates and releases at once, with several failures resulting in the process. This is progress for Apple.

3) What's this entitlement of 2 years of updates with every feature that can possibly fit on the iPhone. It doesn't matter to you that the back end can't handle 120 million iOS devices at once?

4) Would you really feel better if they installed the client side of Siri on your iPhone 4 (because the HW can handle it) but then didn't allow the server-side processing to take place? Wouldn't that mean you wouldn't be able to voice dial or play an artist or playlist in Music because the local Voice Control would be gone? How is that a better experience?

I think you're just jealous Siri can process natural human language better than you.

-Context trigger words
-can process natural human language

You see what you did there?

I don't expect strategic decisions to be shared with the rest of the world, but when a new OS comes out and Apple advertise its features and pushes people to upgrade the way Apple has, you better tell me why you are creating a tiered customer base, especially when we are locked by carrier contracts.

1) If you are locked into a contract why does it even matter?

2) The entitlement you people have is unreal. If Apple was trying to force you to update your current device by making it appear inferior why would they give you any update to the device, mucless going back three generations for the same basic OS. They'd just follow their competition's lead and never release a major update.

I had speech recognition and text to speech om my apple II+ with a 4 mhz 6502 so i'm pretty sure siri would run fine on the original iphone. All the heavy computing is done on apple's servers which are tasked with figuring out how to respond.
Siri is definitely beta and here in Canada that would even be a stretch. But when i chose to get the 4s it was to upgrade my phone. With or without siri my decision would have been the same.
When siri gets beyond beta i wouldnt be surprised to see it on other ios devices.

Wow. It sure did take a while for the "Hu-Dur" meme to make it your way.

Reason 1:
When you have a set of machines processing something, it will be faster than a single machine doing it (duh). In this context, a set of servers (even moving at the same speed as an iPhone) can process your text faster than your iPhone because the load is being split among the servers, allowing more than one task to be processed at once. Your requests are also going to a server whose sole purpose is to decode "speech" context. While processing requests on an an iPhone may be fast, they can be faster in a server farm.

Reason 2:
By offloading the task of determining the meaning of your text to a server, Apple has the ability to upgrade and change Siri all they want without putting out software updates. Do you think Siri really thinks about what you say? No, it simply is reading predefined text that was created by someone else and was pointed to by your text. It is much faster to update a (decentralized) database than millions of iPhones; it saves the work of pushing the update to be downloaded through http servers, it keeps all editions of Siri's speech decoding identical and update to date, and users will never even notice that things are changing or be bothered about having to update for a change.

Reason 3:
By having Apple process the text instead of your phone, you can limit whose requests are processed. Basically, Apple can totally block out other iOS devices from using Siri with very little effort.

One of the first things SJ said when he launched the original iPhone was and I'm paraphrasing " it makes more sense to have software keyboard than a hardware keyboard, so that you don't need to buy a new phone to get a new feature" I interpret this to mean that as more and better UI's are developed they will be available on older hardware.

So logically it makes no sense for Apple to limit Siri to only newer hardware unless they have real technical reasons not to like performance and so on. I do not believe Apple plays the game of obsessively keeping technology from users to coerce them to buying new hardware. They have generally made the hard ware better and do tend to make backwards compatible changes in the OS to as many of the existing phones as possible.

In a previous thread there is an interview with Saurik linked. I think it sums up jail breaking quite well. He shows off all the 'cool' stuff you can do with a jail broken iPhone. The best bit? When he goes into settings and it won't load.

These guys seem to enjoy imperfect solutions and if they say Siri runs as fast on an iPhone 4 I would take this with a pinch of salt. I'm sure their device is rock solid and doesn't crash. \

If you want to tinker then download Xcode, it's free. If you want to run your apps on your iPhone you can if you get a dev license.

Shit, if your apps are any good you can even sell them on the app store.

Your analogy makes no sense by the way. Wtf has drink driving and using a phone got to do with each other? Ooh ah, it's like jail breaking, get a fkin grip.

I just think that it's funny how jail breaking was passed as legal but hacking an Xbox, ps3 Nintendo DS is all illegal. All of these processes are exactly the same. They all let you run home brew software AND enable piracy.

Sorry if it looked that way -- I was rather trying to point out that the particular examples didn't seem to require vastly different capabilities.

Comparing Siri to related algorithms, I am quite amazed how advanced it is. "Speaktoit" on Android has a long way to go, and Vlingo is even further behind.


Voice recognition is everywhere, the really good thing about Siri is that it is not reliant on perfect understanding of the commands, it rather goes after figuring out the context.

You might own the hardware but you don't own the software. The software is on loan to you. You are leasing the software. The hardware won't run without the software smartguy.

You don't own as much as you think you do. Try not paying property taxes on that house you paid for and see who owns it. Even better, try neglecting your kids and see if they don't get taken from you, the so called owner. You don't own #%#@!

Well played

my guess is that Apple will release Siri via the App store in about 3 months for the iPhone 4 and 3G3.
the cost will be somewhere between $39 and $59.

they are just waiting for the 4s sales to level off.

Top free book on the Apple Book Store I see, maybe you helped this?