Siri Hacked: Apple's Voice Assistant Cracked, Could Run On Android Apps

Siri Under Siege: Apple's Voice Assistant Cracked, Could Run On Android Apps

As soon as Apple released Siri, the helpful and occasionally hilarious voice assistant featured on its latest iPhone, the race was on to hack it on to other devices.

Currently Siri is only available on the iPhone 4S, though users have been clamouring for its eerie robotic tones to appear on iPods, iPads and other devices too.

Several attempts have been made to port the application to other phones and tablets, often with little success.

But now the race may be over, after the announcement by a team of mobile developers at Applidium that poor, helpless Siri has been cracked wide open - and the details of how to access its servers have spilled all over the internet.

The hack has raised the theoretical prospect that Siri's abilities could be replicated by apps for other devices, including those based on Android.

The Applidium team figured out that since the robotic butler uses a remote server, and not the iPhone's processor, to translate your demands, there is theoretically no reason why any other device could take advantage if they knew how to communicate with the system.

By monitoring the servers being accessed by the phone when using Siri, the team discovered a secure address accessed by the application every time a voice recognition request was sent.

Usually the server only responds to iPhones with the relevant security certificates, but it didn't take them long to work out how to fool the server in to thinking any device was an iPhone.

The result? Given a suitable amount of effort, time and, presumably, a reason to bother, you can now use Siri's voice recognition protocol from any computer.

The caveat is that users still need a unique iPhone ID to use the server.

No apps exploiting this method have been released, and it is also very likely that Apple will take action against it - either through a security patch or blacklisting any users that attempt to breach its rules.

So for those of you impatient to bark misunderstood orders and insults at your phone and have it understand them, we suggest caution.

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