Siri Could Work on Android through New Hack

Siri, the sultry voice of the iPhone 4Ss, could soon become available on Android devices if French software company Applidum's claims to have cracked the data format are true.

In an online statement, Applidum announced that they have figured out Siri's protocol. As a result, we are able to use Siri's recognition engine from any device. Yes, that means anyone could now write an Android app that uses the real Siri! Or use Siri on an iPad!

The company discovered that Siri's voice recognition feature functions through communicating with a secure server. In this case Applidum found that the iPhone 4S was communicating with server guzzoni.apple.com.

Siri's protocol is opaque, according to Applidum. Just by setting up a custom SSl certification authority and adding it to the iPhone 4S, engineers managed to use it to their own certificate to fake guzzoni.apple.com.

The protocol is actually very, very chatty, Applidum says. Your iPhone sends a tons of things to Apple's servers. And those servers reply an incredible amount of information. For example, when you're using text-to-speech, Apple's server even replies a confidence score and the timestamp of each word.

It seems easy, but there is one catch. Any Siri client would have to include a key from an iPhone 4S in order to function properly. If it is used by other clients, Apple could easily lock out the key. Therefore Android devices would have to find a way to impersonate the new iPhone 4S.

Ryan Paul from Ars Technica says it is unclear how Apple would respond to third-party Siri clients. We suspect that the company would shut them down quickly. It could become difficult for Apple to manage and predict the load on its Siri servers, if a large number of new users were to begin hammering the service from additional devices, he wrote in his blog.

Applidum has published the software code for its online hack, which will work with any Apple key. The company has not published the code for fake keys but they claim it is easy to use via the tools published on their Website. The research carried out by Applidum has paved the way for individual developers to crack the key restriction, which could pose great problems for Apple in the future.

Many jailbreaks are available online that claim to make Siri available on all Apple devices included the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. One caveat, there have been reports that many of these jailbreaks are proxy and could potentially harm your device. Here is one published by Hacker F@rZaD on his twitter page:

Procedures to Install Siri

Step 1

Extract the files you downloaded from the requirements to your desktop.

Step 2

Now plug in your device to your desktop via USB cable. Using a file explorer such as iPhone Explorer, copy the AssistantServices.framework folder to Root > System > Library > PrivateFrameworks

Step 3

Copy each and every file inside the SpringBoard folder to the following path: /system/library/coreservice/springboard.app

Step 4

Look for N90AP.plist in the springboard.app file and open it with iFile in text format and append this line at the bottom

''assistant'' after ''720p''

Step 5

Restart your device while holding the Home button.