Hackers love to take up intellectual challenges for the benefit of most users. Being smart and creative they love to make available the fruits of their effort to one and all based on their belief in open source based collaborative programming. Not all large organizations are impressed by these creative pursuits which eat into their markets and disturb their monopoly. However it results in greater competition and newer products and applications in the market. SIRI, Apple’s intelligent personal assistant for its iPhones has been the latest to fall victim to hackers’ concentrated efforts.
What is SIRI used for?
SIRI is a voice based virtual assistant meant to work on Apple’s smart phone devices to schedule tasks, pass on reminders, send messages, make phone calls and help the user by performing specific commands. Users like working with a voice based interface and it has been reported that after the launch of SIRI the usage of iPhone devices rose to great levels. SIRI is a specialized kind of engine with context, semantic and personalized search and tasking capabilities. It not only simplifies the life of the smart phone user, but makes it interesting and delightful too. Users are beginning to consider it as a kind of personal secretary.
The matter with Android devices
Android is an open source based Linux operating systems for smart phones and tablet computers. It is widely popular with users and enjoys the backing of a consortium of several large players such as Google, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Texas Instruments, among others. Gauging the popularity of SIRI, the market has been flooded with many SIRI imitations. These voice based assistants are designed to work on other smart phones. Natural language processing has been present since long, however it is to the credit of Apple to bring it back in the limelight in the form of SIRI.
Hacked SIRI to work on Android devices
Now hackers claim to have reverse engineered SIRI to adapt it to other Android devices. While the whole exercise of using the voice recognition based software protocol for non-Apple devices is not fully clear, it brings to users many attractive and impressive features. After SIRI’s protocol was hacked and published, developers have been able to implement the protocol on other Android devices. After the open HTTP protocol used by SIRI to communicate with a remote server for conveying commands was known, it has been ported to many other devices. This was the result of the persistent efforts of the hacking community after the launch of SIRI. A broken security protocol provided vital clues to the functioning of the intelligent virtual assistant born from the creative efforts of Apple researchers.
What this means for smart phone users?
This has led to a luxury of using a wide range of services for smart phone users. They can leverage the best out of their smart phone, multi-tasking on the move, asking the virtual assistant for information such as location of a given restaurant or getting a reminder on when to call a friend.