I would like to introduce to you Asiri, the SiriProxy plugin that allows Siri to talk and interpret many other languages, that are not currently supported by Apple. As with SiriProxy, It doesn’t require you to jailbreak your iPhone 4S, unless you’re not using iPhone 4S.
The First Idea and Its Quick Death
I had this idea when the guys from Applidium first reverse-engineered the Siri protocol, and published their work. I knew there’s no technical limitation for my idea, since I can intercept the bit flow, see all kind of communication that’s going from the iPhone to Apple, and back, well, except for one. I didn’t have access to a good Arabic, or multi-language, speech recognition system.
Since developing one from scratch will take a lot of time and effort. I quickly scratched the idea out of my head and continued with my life.
Reviving The Idea
Then, while I was reading about the new features of HTML5, and draft papers, I came across the speech API. It was proposed by Google. Further research led me to an actual implementation and usage of Google APIs.
I saw Siri idea coming back to life with this new finding. However, there’s one tiny problem, the access to the APIs is not documented, which means shouldn’t be used by the public.
Seeing that my project depends not only on one undocumented API, but two, I figured I will use it for testing out my idea at least.
Different Audio Codecs
I faced a small issue during my testing. Apple uses Speex for encoding the voice bit stream, while Google uses FLAC. I think Speex is also used by Google, but I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working out for me. I came to the same finding as Mike Pultz, that they’re using a special form of Speex.
I wrote a small library in C called speer, to convert Apple’s Speex to raw PCM 16bit LE. I may enhance it in the future to convert to FLAC directly, but I just needed something quick and dirty for my idea, and to proof my concept.
When the library was ready, I wrote Asiri, which depends on it, as well as ffmpeg, to convert the PCM from speer to FLAC, and I had the first implementation of my idea working. Few days pass by, and further enhancing both speer, and Asiri, led to today, the public release of Asiri.
Now, both Asiri and speer are a work in progress, and I really hope anyone who wants to participate, to do so freely. Both are released under dual-license terms, GPL and MIT.
I hope you will enjoy playing with Asiri.
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Mohammady Mahdy:
Amazing work
Keep it up!
Abdulrahman Alotaiba:
Thank you
Hossam Hammady:
Good job Abdulrahman
However, the content of the language files need to be populated by tons of useful interactions, no such content available on the Internet?
Abdulrahman Alotaiba:
Thanks Hossam,
Yeah well, language files are hello world examples. But you’re right, we need to add more commands and output. Btw, you’re welcome to contribute a patch and I’ll add it to upstream.
Ahmed:
Hi Abdulrahman ,
what have you done called the flagship work, it is the most amazing innovation ever seen on the web. I am in love into siri but unfortunately i am using iphone 4 Jailbroken but I have no idea how can I get siri working on that, do you have any suggestion please. I really need to try it.. thanks Ahmed
Abdulrahman Alotaiba:
Hi Ahmed,
Thank you very much for your kind words. It means a lot to me.
I don’t know how you can install Siri on iPhone 4. I’ve heard you could do it with Spire. But to be honest, I’ve never tried it.
Rayan Gary:
Can you please explain how to install it step by step?
خالد:
السلام عليكم كيف حالك ممكن شرح كيف اصافة اللغبة العربية
AbdulRhman:
ماشاء الله تبارك الله غيرها ما أقول، الله يوفقك يا سمي
Best of luck and I really can’t wait for ur final touches on it.
Nancy elsayed:
Mabrrrooook Otaiba everyone are talking about what you did, always acting proactively since your first application
best wishes
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Akram:
Hello Abdulrahman, nice work keep it up, i’m from iPhoneDevAr.com, i can’t write any post until your project is ready, please send me more information to akramzbn8@gmail.com
Good luck!
Hossam Hammady:
Nancy, Abdo’s first app I guess is much older than what we all think
Abdo, I suggest that we plan for a Siri Proxy service and let users use it right away. For end users, it is huge pain to install a proxy on their own.
A side question, can Siri listen to commands in a language and respond in another language? If so, we can create a translation service similar to the conversation mode of Google Translate.
Mohamed Ali AL Merri:
Good job keep it up.
Aiman Zuh:
Just a though; Why not putting it in Cydia and some .deb files to easy installing this app since most of it is command lines that could be written into a script file. Also, you can make more than one version for several languages.
Abdulrahman Alotaiba:
Hi Aiman,
This is not an app, it’s a service. So If normal users would like to use it, they have to install it on a server, and configure Siri to send the requests to this server.
An easy way would be using Spire on iPhone 4. I have never tried it, but from what I hear it’s configurable.
The other way is to use a normal iPhone 4S, not necessarily jailbroken, and route all Siri traffic to this server.
haisly:
يعطيك العافية متمنيا لك المزيد من التقدم
Abdulaziz Ibrahim:
Great work
we all proud of you
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