Unless you happen to have been living on the dark side of the moon for the past week you will no doubt be aware that Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, has finally made its way legally over to older iOS 5 devices such as the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 4G. That is right Siri is now available legally on the iPhone 4 and can be downloaded for free from Cydia in the form of an app named Spire.
While iPhone 4 owners all over the world are no doubt overjoyed (the download from cydia took several attempts to download due to overload) that Spire is the first legal Siri port for the iPhone 4 to be released there is still one small problem that needs to be overcome. Actually it is a rather big problem that needs to be overcome. Siri on iPhone 4 still has no real mass consumption way of connecting to the Apple servers and this effectively means that both Spire and Siri on the iPhone 4 are pretty much useless unless you happen to have a Spire or Siri proxy server. This is why you may have noticed a huge increase in people on twitter tweeting about Spire or Siri proxy servers.
Most of the processing for Siri is not actually carried out on the actual iPhone. When you ask Siri a question the iPhone connects to the Apple servers where everything is processed and then sent back to the phone.
This means for Siri to function on your iPhone 4 or other iOS5 device you are going to need access to a Spire or Siri proxy server in order for your device to connect with the Apple servers.
Chwpn has given several ways of accomplishing this on his blog:
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.
So for all of those of you out there egar to have Siri ported to your iPhone 4 you still may be disappointed and have some waiting to do until Siri is fully up and running on your device. We would imagine that in the coming days there will be more and more Spire and Siri servers that will spring up across the internet some of them free and some of them available to use at a cost.
We would urge you to act with caution when choosing a server as everything from your phone, that means your contacts, messages, emails, and Apple ID, all have to go through your chosen Spire Siri server so that means whoever owns the server could potentially collect your data and use it however they see fit.
For the time being at least we would advise you to give these Spire Siri proxy servers a wide berth until a well-documented and approved solution is found. Remember that Apple will soon get wise to any proxy server allowing iPhone 4’s access it’s server and any paid proxy server is very likely to be a scam. The internet is already a wash, as is Twitter and Facebook with tales of people paying good money for the use of a Spire proxy server only to find that it does not work and was nothing more than a scam.
Good look on your quest and feel free to share any information or thoughts you may have on finding a valid Spire or Siri proxy server. As soon as we hear any more news on this or a valid solution we will let you know here, on our Facebook or Twitter.
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