Developers crack Siri open to work on any device

Developers at Applidium claim that they have cracked open Apple's Siri intelligent voice-controlled assistant feature to work on any device. Siri is restricted to the iPhone 4S, but has been hacked to work to some degree on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. And now, Applidium says that it has managed to crack Siri open to be inserted into apps on other platform such as Android.

Applidium developers were able to decipher Siri's security protocol by setting up their own custom SSL certification authority and adding it to their iPhone 4S to find out the commands that Siri sends to Apple's official servers. They have released the access tools and given a full rundown of their process.

In theory, this hack could allow Siri to be used on an iPad, a Mac, or even an Android device. But the catch is that it still requires the UDID of an iPhone 4S, which lets Apple's servers believe that the device is authorized. But if Apple decides to block your UDID for suspicious activity, that would also kill your iPhone 4S.

Additionally, Applidium developers discovered that the iPhone 4S sends a lot of raw audio data back to Apple's servers and compresses them using a VoIP-oriented Speex audio codec. Apple's servers also send plenty of data back such as confidence scores and timestamps for each word.

[via iPodNN]