Apple's Iphone Siri gets hacked to control a TV

A HACKER has rejigged Apple's voice-activated personal assistant Siri to control a TV, with some interesting results.

The hacker, Tood Treece has posted a short blog and a video of Siri in action, which can change channels and switch the TV off with just voice commands. However, some additional hardware has been introduced for the system to make it work.

Siri responds to questions such as, "Siri, can you change the channel to the History channel?" and it responds with information about what's playing on that channel and asks the user to confirm the switch.

We particularly like the response Siri gives after discovering Piers Morgan Tonight is on CNN. "Do you really want to watch this crap?"

The Iphone sends a command to an Arduino microcontroller via transmission control protocol (TCP) and the required information is gathered from a TV guide web site.

This project is based on the same open source proxy code as the thermostat hack we saw last month. It's an expensive way to control your TV, but Siri type technology is looking more and more likely to be the future of controlling the home. µ

Siri Universal Remote from toddtreece on Vimeo.