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Siri Protocol Cracked
First time accepted submitter jisom writes with something that will probably not be working come morning. Quoting the source: "Today, we managed to crack open 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! And we're going to share this know-how with you."
Basically, Siri sends the data to the processing server using non-standard HTTP extensions. Of note is that the audio is encoded using Ogg Speex.
While you could write an Android app or anything else, the protocol sends an unique ID with the request. That ID is unique to every iPhone 4S. End result being, you can probably use your own for your personal use, but if you try to sell an App for Android and include your ID with it, Apple will just blacklist it. So you will still need your own iPhone 4S.
3.. 2.. 1...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The quality of the anonymous coward troll posts is declining. I expected more.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
That's what they wanted people to think. 99% of all phone apps have very little to do with the actual phone and instead they're just quick reference URLs to some external site that does most of the work. Of course they tie all the apps to the phone so that you can't bypass the store.
Why would they waste the processing horsepower? It would eat the battery if it was even at all possible. They can do higher quality recognition on their servers anyway. The customer does not need to know where the processing is done as long as "it just works". To the consumer, and even some more technically inclined, it's magic -- and that is the real genius in the way Apple presents it's products. They make people feel like they're somehow in the future, that they're talking to an intelligent phone, that Saint Steve has somehow created artificial life and they get to own a piece of this future for the price of a modest chunk of change and a two year contract.
> I thought it ran on the phone itself.
Nope, and that is the scam. Basically you are calling a service. Thus they could make Siri available on every iProduct with zero effort. That they decided to hold it as an exclusive feature for the 4S to try and create the 'gotta upgrade' stampede is truly lame. Keeping it to iProducts is ok, they ain't giving away a hefty compute farm after all, who do ya think they are after all, Google? But locking access to the service to one submodel of one product line is a terrible idea.
Democrat delenda est
I, too am shocked at how many people didn't realize this was all done server side -- especially here.
Doing the processing on the server seems very slow to me - I can find a contact much faster by pressing the first few letters than waiting for the round-trip latency to siri.
Heaps of people have tried to demo siri to me and most of the time it was a gimick that failed badly - either was slower than manual methods or just innacurate.
I knew this long ago... I just asked "Siri, what protocols are you using to communicate with your server?"
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
"Siri, Don't sue. Confirm.", Siri, "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave."
If Apple is learning anything from Google, it's that customer info is valuable. Siri could easily become an advertising platform that rivals Google. Targeted advertising, where companies pay Apple for premium listings ( eg Asking Siri about a Pizza place returns Pizza Hut who paid the most for that key word).
If that's their angle, they might welcome more traffic to Siri.
The most alarming fact, for me, is that they are sending all my speech data over the Internet to some enormous Cloud database. Oh, and while they have it all, I must trust Apple now that they are not gonna mine this data and send it backdoor to advertisers and other interests.
Speech recognition isn't too CPU intensive, but it's *massively* memory intensive. It's not unreasonable for speech recognition engines to eat up a gig of ram, and the 4S only has 512mb. However, push it to a server with lots of ram and it can handle lots and lots of simultaneous speech recognition queries. It's tailor made to be a server-side task. At least until phones have gigs of free memory that aren't needed.
.. can you ask Siri "where to hide a body" before a backend notification gets emailed to a detective at your local PD?
What? I think that may be the primary purpose of Siri in the end. Only a small minority give a crap about security anyway.
Well, they send your Siri requests. And, of course, almost everything you do on you cellphone is sent somewhere it can be tracked and recorded.
TFA is actually pretty interesting:
Some Apple software (parts of iTunes) goes further and checks that the certificate presented by the server is actually signed by Apple. If the Siri software did this then the server would be impossible to fake man-in-middle-wise without hacking the client itself. Just checking that the certificate is valid is pretty useless protection - any certificate could be valid, what you care about is whether the server is who it says it is.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
planes have wifi these days.
in other news, you're no longer allowed to smoke.
Yet the music player still doesn't support Ogg Vorbis.
Doing the processing on the server seems very slow to me - I can find a contact much faster by pressing the first few letters than waiting for the round-trip latency to siri.
Yep. It's extremely annoying, actually, because Siri replaces the existing voice commands. So doing something like "call brother" - which used to take maybe a half second - takes a good three seconds or so of lag time. More annoyingly is things like "play playlist driving songs" - first you have to wait for the three seconds round-trip processing, then you have to wait for the iPhone to decide which playlist that matches ("Looking for playlist driving songs," Siri says), then you have to wait for her to narrate "playing playlist driving songs" before the music actually starts.
Compare to the previous, non-Siri version:
"Play playlist driving songs."
(half-second pause) "Playing playlist driving songs." (music starts)
Yay progress. About the only thing I use Siri for is asking dumb questions and seeing what responses I get. For actual voice controls, it's - well, not useless, exactly, just obnoxiously slow.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Haha! They fooled you too. The dirty little secret is that Siri is actually a nice old lady in Delhi.
There's an awfully big chance the codec was determined and implemented way before Apple even touched the product.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It seems fairly ill-advised for a company whose business is developing iOS apps to post their reverse engineering exploits on the corporate blog.
So turn it off : "If you wish to use Voice Control while you are not connected to the Internet, turn Siri off from Settings > General > Siri. Make sure to turn Siri back on when you have Internet connectivity and you wish to use it again."
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Apple's actually pretty quick to reject apps for not offering enough functionality over a website. Simply embedding a site in a webview and calling it an app (what was implied to be happening upthread) is pretty much a 100% guaranteed way to get your app rejected.
It's terribly obnoxiously slow. It's also a lot broader than previous voice-command efforts. I set a baking timer by saying "Siri, set an alarm for twenty minutes from now." I had no idea that "twenty minutes from now" would be something that Siri understood. It just seemed like it would make sense. And it just worked. "Text my wife that I'll be about 10 minutes late" works too.
Well, it works when the network is responding. And it works terribly slow. But it is really a step towards natural language understanding of voice. Or rather, unlike a lot of other efforts I feel like the phone is trying to understand me rather than the other way around.
The ______ Agenda