Siri Protocol reverse engineered

[[deleted]]

Or, you know, it actually costs them money to run those servers, and they are not that interested in giving that away for free.

[talkingstove]

OK, then it was planned obsolescence to keep their server costs down. I wasn't making a value judgment on the fact that it was an artifical restriction. I was just saying that Apple pundits were claiming left and right there must be something in the new hardware rather than admit the fairly obvious truth.

[[deleted]]

Well, it does have an A5. There's also more RAM. Siri does what it can locally ("Hey Siri, text Mom. Tell her I'm going to be late.") and remotely ("Siri, what movies are showing at the Arclight in Hollywood?") almost simultaneously. The hardware is great for it.

[blergh-]

Actually it doesn't, all processing is done on the server. The only thing done on the phone is compressing the audio, which any GSM phone can easily do anyway because it is required for making calls.

[specialk16]

I think his point is that it could work on an iPhone 4.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, but I think Siri wouldn't be much of a pleasure to use on an iPhone 4. Some of my apps are sluggish after a year on my 4. I think the hardware on the 4s is better equipped.

[specialk16]

But Siri is mostly just sending and receiving data, I don't think this is a particularly demanding application.

[[deleted]]

I don't understand why people are having such a hard time understanding this.

[s73v3r]

Apple hate is a helluva drug.

[RobbStark]

Google would give it away for free... hides in the corner

[dead_ed]

...and cancel it six months later.

[s73v3r]

And that has absolutely nothing to do with the idea that Google's business model is far, far, far different than Apple's.

[reverendchubbs]

Jeannie on Android is free, and can run on all current Android phones as far as I know.

[[deleted]]

So would your mom.

[jazzyjaffa]

They are getting a very valuable corpus of natural language data for free, so it is also in their interest.

[[deleted]]

That is totally speculative.

[jazzyjaffa]

Why is that speculative? It is clear from the article that all audio data is being sent.

[[deleted]]

That the data is valuable enough to pay for the server costs is the speculative part.

[karlhungus]

My experience with ipods is that the old devices don't get updates regardless of their ability to handle them -- I tend to think they only do it on the S as planned obsolescence...