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Developer Steven Troughton-Smith had Siri working on his iPhone 4 shortly after the 4S launched, but with one major problem: it couldn’t talk to Apple’s servers, so local info couldn’t be retrieved. (A bit like using Siri in the UK, then.)
Now he’s fixed that, making it work fully on an iPhone 4, 9to5Mac reports. So what excuse does Apple have for keeping the voice-controlled assistant an iPhone 4S exclusive?
An iPhone 4S jailbreak was required to port the proper files for Siri’s servers to connect to an iPhone 4. But the video demo below clearly shows it working, finding a local Starbucks, telling jokes, and answering how many metres are in a kilometre. Troughton-Smith has also made it work on an iPod touch.
“At this point it’s all about confirming this works across devices… and documenting everything,” Troughton-Smith told 9to5Mac. “It does require files from an iPhone 4S which aren’t ours to distribute, and it also requires a validation token from the iPhone 4S that has to be pulled live from a jailbroken iPhone 4S, and it’s about a 20-step process right now.
“It literally took no longer than 10 minutes to put all the pieces in place and perform our first test on my iPhone 4, and it was an instant success,” he continued. The microphone on the fourth-gen iPod touch isn’t as responsive, so it doesn’t work as well.
Hopefully this will put pressure on Apple to release Siri for the iPhone 4, though it’s highly likely it’ll stay as a 4S exclusive to lure people into buying the new mobile. Despite record sales, plenty of iPhone 4 owners are still reluctant to upgrade, particularly with reports surfacing over the weekend of a bug in the new phone’s location software causing serious battery drain problems.
Do you think Apple should officially bring Siri to the iPhone 4 and iPod touch? Let us know on our Facebook page, or in the comments section. Just don’t ask us any tricky questions.
