Hacker gets Siri to work with a radio thermostat

A HACKER has altered Apple's voice-activated personal assistant Siri to interact with and change the temperature of his thermostat, opening a world of possible uses for Siri around the house.

The hacker, known as Pete, tweeted about his development and put up a Youtube video showing it in action.

It works by using a proxy server for Siri, which allows the user to connect with other devices without the need for a jailbreak, since all of the action is occuring off the Iphone.

The development is quite impressive, with Pete demonstrating how Siri can find out the current temperature of a radio thermostat and then change that temperature, in addition to reporting a general status update on the device.

The possibilities for expansion are endless, with Siri potentially becoming a household assistant, turning on and off lights, televisions, cookers, electric blinds, and doing other everyday tasks that we would rather talk to our Iphones about than do in person.

The Siri Proxy is based on a recent development by French software company Applidium that breaks through the protection mechanisms in place to prevent Siri from being used on anything but the Iphone 4S.

Apple was able to restrict Siri to the Iphone 4S by requiring a unique identifier, which means that even with this hack users will still need an Iphone 4S identifier code in order to access the Siri servers. The same applies both to older Iphones and Android devices.

There is a strong possibility that Apple could blacklist the Iphone 4S identifier in order to block devices from accessing Siri with it. However, we have to think Apple likely would only do this for those who share their identifier with multiple people or publish it on the internet.

We contacted Apple about this latest Siri development, but Apple declined to comment on it.

The Siri Proxy code can be downloaded from the Github web site. µ