Siri hack allows 'partial' control on iPhone 4

A developer may be making progress in porting Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant in Apple’s newest iPhone 4S, to an older iPhone 4, an Apple enthusiast site said. 9to5mac.com said Steven Troughton-Smith managed to get Siri’s interface to load up, with all the features from the iPhone 4S implementation. “Siri on the iPhone 4 can recognize spoken commands in both the standard Siri view and the keyboard Dictation view. The only issue at this point is that Apple is not authenticating (obviously) commands to its servers from iPhone 4 hardware," 9to5mac.com said. On the other hand, it said the Siri port to the iPhone 4 also has the ability to speak back to the user, although Siri and the iPhone 4 may act sluggish. It said the issue is not Siri, but is that a special GPU driver for iPhone 4, “and it is obviously not included in the iPhone 4S binary cache – where the Siri files are located." But it said the progress made so far indicates there is “no technical reason for Apple not to allow Siri to run on the iPhone 4." “The iPhone 4 hardware can support the Siri artificial intelligence system, as the A4 processor is said to be powerful enough. We are not entirely sure why Apple is making Siri an iPhone 4S exclusive but it could be due to special microphone support, or because the A5 may allow it to run slightly quicker," it said. 9to5mac said it will continue to work with Troughton-Smith to port Siri to the iPhone 4. A separate article on PC World said another problem is that much of Siri’s voice processing actually happens on Apple’s servers. It said Troughton-Smith has so far not figured out how to fool Apple into thinking an iPhone 4 is an iPhone 4S. “Without access to Apple’s servers, Siri won’t be able to do much for iPhone 4 users. And if Troughton-Smith, or someone else, is successful in porting Siri’s complete functionality, there’s also the question of whether Apple’s lawyers will try and stop the software from being distributed to jailbroken iPhone 4 users," it added. On the other hand, it said Siri’s apparent ability to work on an older iPhone 4 fuels the debate on whether Apple withheld Siri from the iPhone 4 for technical reasons or to encourage users to buy the latest iPhone 4S. — TJD, GMA News