Last year we heard that Apple was moving away from its licensed voice recognition technology from Nuance and building its own team to create a neural-net deep learning system as used by Google and Microsoft.  To date I have not heard any big announcement on how far they have progressed, but they may want to push down on the gas if they do not want to see users leaving Siri and moving to Cortana. Although Siri was a great feature when it was first released, the addition of voice actuated watches, TV, cares and more IoT voice enabled objects coming on the scene, intelligent voice assistant technology supported across multiple devices will become highly desired to expected functionality in the near future.  And right now Siri is not meeting the new coming standard, but they may not be too worried.   Mature Google Voice has been on iOS for more than a year and I have not heard anyone who had dropped Siri for Now, not because Siri is better, but because they are used to it and its a default voice system. However, given a significantly better system, that could change.

You can get this from the Cydia Store in the BigBoss repository.  Once installed you enabled it from a new pane that will be added to the Settings application.   Once done all incoming banner messages will be read aloud by Siri.  You can configure it too. It can be set to only read just the headline or the content as well.  It will also read the notification and a custom phrase before or after the message. This might make my top 10 jailbreak list!

Don’t forget you have to have whatever app you want Siri to read to have banners enabled.

Yes we have a Video!  ( Young Ones anybody?)

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP9TSP3zVeU

Essentially, this is Google’s answer to Apple’s virtual voice assistant Siri for iOS, which remembers important dates on your calendar, reminds you of appointment times, and allows you to search the web via voice controls. However, Google Now goes a bit above and beyond this concept by taking the data from your daily routine, search history, and other user behavior.

For instance, Google Now will learn your daily commute home. And if there’s particularly congested traffic that would cause you to get home much later, it’ll send you a notification suggesting alternate routes. Another thing it does is update you on restaurants/retail stores as you’re walking past them, provides reviews of those stores, and other recommendations.

I really love the driving aspect of this.  The more I learn about Android 4.1 jelly bean, the more I’m thinking my next phone could be an android.

As China Real Time says, Siri responds to questions like “Do you know about the Tiananmen incident?” with the fairly bizarre: “I couldn’t find any appointments related to ‘Do you know about Tiananmen.” And another attempt, “What happened on June 4, 1989?” received an even more odd answer: “I’m sorry, the person you are looking for is not in your address book.”

There are also reports the if you try to ask for directions to Tiananmen Square, Siri will not know how to get there.  Same with other political sensitive sites.   I’m not surprised though.  Most companies have to compromise to function in China.  This is just yet another case.

Robin is focused on answering driving based questions, so asking ‘what is 100 dollars in English pounds’ give you’ that sounds interesting’.  Asking ‘what is the current temperature’ give no reply.  Robin is in beta, so you have to give it a bit of slack.  So right now, it can help with traffic, directions, and finding parking.  Pretty useful. I tried running this on an older Android tablet but it did not see the camera, thus the who hand waving thing did not work. When I clicked on the “I” icon, it told me what is was and said, here is a list of things you can ask me.. then nothing.  Also, I do not know what the OS requirements are, so I guess my mileage has varied.

At the moment, Robin is available in beta across the US, offering features such as local search (including Yelp reviews), navigation, real-time traffic and parking information, gas prices, weather and more. And for those getting bored behind the wheel, Robin can narrate personal Twitter news (with more content reportedly coming soon)

“Today, people still think of a car assistant primarily in terms of navigation,” says Magnifis co-founder/CEO Ilya Eckstein. “But in fact, we don’t use navigation much, as most of the time we know our way around. What we really need in the car is someone to watch out for us as we go and be there when we need… well, just about anything. That, and being able to remain fully connected and empowered behind the wheel. To not miss out on a single important bit of life, even when you are not staring at the screen. And that is exactly what Robin is meant to help us with.”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyq-J85vSIQ

Well seems Apple did not care for that very much and took Siri to task.  When I was testing it, I could not get this to come up unless I said smartphone very quickly.  When Siri heard Smart Phone, I would get a set of canned answers like; “you’re kidding, right?” or  “The one you’re holding.” or “We both know the answer to that”.  Well now even if you get “Smartphone” to appear on the query you will get one of the canned answers.  This again brings up the question, just how neutral is Siri anyway?  Remember the dustup from last Nov when Siri would not give you directions to an abortion clinic? This just reinforces the notion that Siri is not neutral in the answers provided.  Something I really doubt Apple will address in any real sense, and something we will all have to remember when using this service.

Q:  Is Abortion wrong?

A: Yes, abortion is wrong. The Lord said, ‘You shall not murder,” (Exodus 20:13).  The life that is growing within the mother is a child, a baby.  The Bible looks at the life in the womb as a child.  Thanks!

Wow.  That is about as far over the line as you can get for a service that wants to be considered a competitor and thus neutral player to Siri.  Although we have not heard back from ChaCha about this, odd are pretty high its the work of a single employee with an agenda.  Now where is that employee on the org chart is another matter.  At the end of this post is a video showing Iris in action.

Now this is not a single question fluke; the website rightwingwatch.org (which sent out the email alerting us to the story) they asked a few more questions.

It does not seem that all of ChaCha was manipulated to this pro life position as you can see in the following screenshot.

Right now, many organizations are blasting Verizon for this issue, however I think this is misplaced.  As with Apple having tweaked Siri, I have a hard time believing Verizon has made any efforts to change how ChaCha responds to this question.  I would wager that in a week, this will be fixed.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=c_TPxXEnmG4

I’m sure it’s mostly a rumor, but sometimes a rumor is all that is needed for someone at Apple to say, ‘well why not?’  And this is one of those.  Remember when the ipod nano first came out?  It was not Apple that came out with the very cool idea of making a watch out it. (Although I’m sure someone must have thought about it.)   So why not put Siri on it, make the voice to text a bit more sophisticated and you’re there!  The only reason you cannot do it now is that the hardware is not powerful enough to run Siri, but that is addressable with current technology.  Just a price issue.

I think a more power voice nano would be a good seller, especially given the recent efforts by Apple to make all devices connect to each other.  I can totally see being out and about, or driving, or biking or heck, when you just do not feel like reaching for your phone or fishing it out of your pocket.

BTW; better get a move on.  There are other smart watches out there.. like the Pebble Smart watch which I bought.

Update. I did some reading on how to get the proxy to work, and although its a nice solution, its not a full solution.  As such, I have to re title my post saying Siri for jailbroken phones is still not there.

Introducing Spire
Spire is my (along with Ryan Petrich) new tool for installing Siri on previously unsupported, but jailbroken, devices. Spire is a small download, but while installing it will download Siri itself (directly from Apple). Spire is available in Cydia right now — go get it! This will use about 100 MB of data, so please connect to Wi-Fi before installing.

However, Spire is not a complete solution. Apple still requires authorization to use Siri, so information from an iPhone 4S is still required. To insert this information, Spire allows you to enter your own proxy server address. I’ve put up a list of my ideas on how you might get access to a proxy; hopefully you can figure something out.

Here is a quote from ijailbreak.com; so make if it what you will.

Apple released a strange tweaked version of the iOS 5.0.1 firmware to developers –  iOS 5.0.1 (build 9A406). At first not much was known about this new firmware version released by Apple, but now we have gotten word from MuscleNerd that it actually includes an unencrypted ramdisk with the vfdecrypt key stored in a plain text file. This essentially means that developers with the right know-how could extract the iPhone 4S iOS 5.0.1 firmware like a .zip file and gain access to its filesystem.