Siri Beta
Real Siri: less likely to stab you in the heart Apple

A team of developers has cracked Apple's personal assistant, Siri, to work on any device, including iPads, computers and even Android smartphones.

The developers, known as Applidium, have reverse-engineered Siri to work out how the "humble personal assistant" interacts with Apple's servers to generate replies and responses to users' requests.

"Today, we managed to crack open Siri's protocol," Applidium said. "As a result, we are able to use Siri's recognition engine from any device. Yes, that means anyone could now write an Android app that uses the real Siri! Or use Siri on an iPad! And we're going to share this know-how with you."

What the developers have done is to extract the internal workings of Siri and run them from a desktop computer; to prove their method worked they have uploaded an audio recording of Siri replying to a command issued from a computer - not an iPhone 4S.

But, for those hoping to finally get Siri working on their iPhone 4 or iPad, the developers have revealed that Apple's servers require a unique identifier - known as the UDID - from the device, and if the UDID is not from an iPhone 4S, then the Siri request will be ignored.

To get around this, Applidium is using a known iPhone 4S UDID - these are easily found in iTunes - but the developers add that Apple may block the UDID at any time if it suspects foul play.

More interestingly, the developers have uploaded a series of files which allow anyone with knowledge of programing languages Ruby and C to create their own Siri applications on any operating system, or incorporate Siri into an application of their own.

Of course, these bootleg applications will never appear in the AppStore, but it gives developers the chance to play around with Siri and come up with some new uses for the personal assistant.