Siri hackers let you voice control your offline life
Source: Blake Ellison
Hackers have learned how to intercept Siri voice commands and are using that knowledge to do some very cool new things.
The video above, posted by Pete Lamonica, shows him to controlling his thermostat using Siri commands. He can raise and lower the temperature or just check to see how it’s set. In typical Siri style, the phone responds with answers to questions (“What’s the heater set to?”) or status confirmations (in response to “Set the heater to 72.”)
Better yet, the hack doesn’t require a jailbreak. Normally, your voice messages are sent to Apple, where Siri servers convert your speech to text. As we saw a couple weeks ago, when those servers go down, Siri stops working. Lamonica and others have written a proxy server that intercepts voice commands before they go to Apple’s server, thanks to work from mid-November that saw the Siri protocol hacked.
Other hackers have taken the SiriProxy project, as it’s called, and applied it in other places. One, by YouTube user fiquett, taps into the Viper SmartStart app to send signals to start and shut off the car. That, of course, requires an additional in-car installation, but for those who have the Viper device, it’s an awesome feature to have.
Another, by YouTube user hjaltij, controls the Plex media center software. As soon as he finishes saying the command “Play the latest episode of MythBusters,” it’s on-screen on his monitor.
Hacks have also been posted to have Siri read headlines from RSS feeds, control lights and curtains inside houses, and more. All of these hacks use that same proxy server trick, so if you’ve got a little hacker-ish knowledge, you can start running your very own Siri extensions.
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