We have now been living with Siri since October 2011 when the iPhone 4S was made available for public consumption. There is no denying that Siri is a powerful addition to a mobile device, with the intelligent voice assistant being able to analyze voice commands and perform specific tasks based on this audible user instruction. But it seems as if the jury is still out on Siri by a lot of people, with a portion of user citing the lack of scope as reason.
When the iPhone 4S and Siri were launched, the software was billed and advertised as a personal assistant; letting you send messages, schedule meetings, make phone calls and a whole host of other pretty impressive things. One of the major benefits was the ability to talk to Siri like a real person, forming full sentences to instruct the software what it is that you wanted to do or achieve. Siri would then analyze that sentence, understand it and process it accordingly as long as it was within the remit of the software. For a lot of things, Siri works flawlessly, but unfortunately the technology has not been deeply integrated into enough of iOS, and there are some things we feel Siri should be able to do but just can’t.
As is usually the way in these type of circumstances, step forward the jailbreak development community. With the recent release of an iPhone 4S jailbreak, we are already starting to see Cydia refreshing with Siri-based tweaks and enhancements. A few of which have gone live in the last couple of days which add additional power to Siri by hooking into certain settings and allowing users to launch specific applications using voice commands and I have no doubt in my mind that in the following few weeks that trend will continue.
But what about the ability to tweet? Apple made quite a big deal about the fact that they were partnering with Twitter to deeply integrate the social service into iOS. After the excitement had died down, all we really got to begin with was native account registering through Settings, and a framework for developers which negates the need to deal with Twitter’s unfriendly APIs (to a certain extent). iOS developer and occasional GrooveShark employee, Tyler Nettleton had a busy day yesterday trying to implement just that exact feature. After having a small break from iPhone development, Nettleton tweeted yesterday that he was missing the iOS scene, promptly followed up by a request to see if any one of his followers would be interested in a tweak which allows Siri to write and post tweets.
The response to this question was obviously positive, as a relatively small amount of time later a teaser video was posted to YouTube showing the tweak in action. The tweak follows the native Siri commands, allowing users to activate Siri and simply say “Tweet …." followed by a message which is then immediately posted to Twitter. Obviously this tweak is not a finished product and will be worked on before release but it looks promising so far.
Thanks Phil for the hat tip!
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