MacRumors reports that Applidium, the development team that brought the open source video player VLC to the App Store (since pulled over licensing issues), has announced that they have reverse engineered the protocol used to allow Siri to communicate with Apple’s servers. The developers state that the servers recognized and analyzed their voice input from other devices just as if it had originated from an iPhone 4S.
Applidium wrote:
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.
One problem for developers hoping to make use of Siri in their apps: The protocol transmits a unique identifier for a given iPhone 4S. While the developers at Applidium were able to obtain an identifier from one of their 4S devices and use it to authenticate non-iPhone Siri input, such an identifier could not be used in a distributed application, as it is believed that Apple’s servers would be able to identify and blacklist any device identifier coming from multiple locations.
However, this proof of concept demonstration may prove interesting for developers who may want to test non-iPhone 4S implementations of Siri for their personal use. A post describing Applidium’s methods can be found here.
