Spire Is The First Legal Siri Port For Older Generation iOS Devices

Jailbreaker extraordinaire Grant Paul (aka chpwn), has finally made the first legal Siri port available to the public. Called "Spire," the port has full support for older generation iOS devices including the iPhone 3GS and iPod touch G3. To install Spire, your device has to be jailbroken and running iOS 5. Spire is available for free on Cydia and is a small download, however, once installed, Spire will need to download Siri files from Apple's servers and they are approximately 100MB; it's best if you stick to Wi-Fi for the download. After completing the download, Siri is not up and running just yet. The catch is that you will first have to set up your own Siri proxy server and obtain authentication tokens from an iPhone 4S; chpwn explains:

Spire is not a complete solution. Apple still requires authorization to use Siri, so information from an iPhone 4S is still required. To insert this information, Spire allows you to enter your own proxy server address. Spire uses a new method to obtain the files necessary for Siri, so it doesn’t have the copyright issues encountered by previous attempts. Similarly, rather than directing all traffic through a specific proxy server (and the associated privacy issues), Spire allows you to specify your own proxy server.

He later posted methods of setting up a proxy server for the Siri port:

• 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.

All of these methods can be quite difficult to set-up for the average iOS user and the fact that you still need an iPhone 4S to make this hack work could, for now, render this hack useless for most. With that, one can imagine the jailbreak community is already working on ways to make use of Spire without an iPhone 4S. We will keep you posted if anything develops. (via chpwn's Blog)

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