Spire: Legal Siri Port Download for iPhone 4, 3GS, iPod touch, iPad in Cydia

A new Siri port has emerged from Grant Paul (chpwn), Steven Troughton-Smith and Ryan Petrich, called Spire. This install is available for the following jailbroken devices on iOS 5: iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPad. What makes this port significant is that it is distributed legally (no copyright infringement here), something other ports have never been able to do.

Spire is available in Cydia as a 100MB download, will require a proxy, and info from an iPhone 4S to operate, as chpwn details:

However, 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. I’ve put up a list of my ideas on how you might get access to a proxy; hopefully you can figure something out.

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.

Chpwn also put up a ‘FAQ’ for Spire, throwing out some insight for those questioning the usefulness of the clever reverse engineering:

There’s any number of ways for you to get a proxy that will help you connect Siri to Apple. Here’s a few of my ideas:

  • 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.
  • If you’re going to attempt this, let us know how it works for you!

    [via chpwn]

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