Apple marketing campaigns have included dancing figures and loads of product shots with catchy tunes in the background, but have been light on celebrity clout. Well the two latest Siri ads that have just aired have certainly upped the ante, featuring Zooey Deschanel and Samuel L. Jackson.
Good fits for Apple? We think so. The two Hollywood stars are seen having intimate conversations with their iPhone 4S and the phone’s Siri digital assistant in their own unique relaxed coolness.
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Ever since Apple released Siri, its voice control app, as an iPhone 4S feature only, there have been endless attempts to get the lady working on other iOS 5 devices. We’ve already seen Siri running on an iPhone 4 and iPod Touch, and the main challenge so far had been to get Apple’s servers to respond to Siri’s requests from non iPhone 4S devices.
Well the developers over at Applidium have one-upped everyone by cracking Siri’s security protocol and getting access to its recognition engine from any device. What they did was setup a fake local Apple server and listen to all of the Siri generated commands from their iPhone 4S going to this fake server. What they found is that Siri sends a unique iPhone 4S identifier with every command, which is what gets the server to respond. If you have an iPhone 4S you could potentially use your phone’s unique identifier and get Apple’s server to respond to any device, even a Mac or Windows PC or an Android phone.
Developers could write their own applications, that would send requests to Apple’s Siri server and get back responses. Obviously there are two issues here, first you need to own an iPhone 4S and then you never know when Apple might catch-up with this method and issue a patch effectively nulling it. In any case, very smart going to the developers, who have also provided a host of info on their website.
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Siri, Apple’s very talkative personal assistant app, which we’ve covered in detail, was announced together with the iPhone 4S. Apple has stated that Siri will only be made available on its latest handset, meaning that if you wanted to try out Siri, you would have to get the iPhone 4S. Well, when there’s a will there’s a way, and Siri found itself ported (or should we say hacked into) ‘unsupported’ iOS 5 devices like the iPad and the iPhone 4. However, so far, although the application ran, Apple’s servers would refuse to respond to any requests, so Siri remained silent.
Well, bright developers Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) and @chpwn, finally got the lady to answer back on an iPhone 4 and an iPod Touch 4G — at least from what we’ve seen in the video, which you can find after the break. According to Steve, Siri runs well on both the iPhone 4 and the iPod Touch, although the latter requires you to speak louder since its microphone was not designed to phone specs.
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Controlling a device with your voice is certainly nothing new. It’s been implemented time and time again and the execution has ranged from terrible, to gimmicky, to just ok, but it has never taken off. It’s been the sort of thing that you show off at family gatherings to impress older relatives but you never end up using.
It has existed on mobile devices for a while but with very limited capabilities. Feature phones could only do things like call up a number. Then, Google brought it on Android with Voice Search and Voice Actions expanding its capabilities. Now, Apple has officially taken a big step into voice control with iOS 5, the iPhone 4S and its personal assistant Siri. Could this mean that we will soon start using our devices in a different way?
Apple didn’t invent the artificial intelligence (AI) and voice recognition technology that makes Siri happen. In fact, Siri on iOS is the result of Apple’s purchase of same named company, Siri, and the use of third-party voice recognition technology (probably Nuance). But Apple has an incredibly successful history of doing exactly this, taking an existing but flailing technology, ironing out the quirks and making it the norm. The Macintosh made the mouse popular, the iPhone revolutionized touch-screen technology and Siri could be the beginning of a new way to interact with our devices.
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