The introduction of Siri along with the iPhone 4S caused a few people to think that voice based commands were going to become the next accepted method of interaction with our mobile devices. Conversely, a number of users simply couldn’t see the merit or value in having to ask questions to find out things like the local weather or what the time is in other countries. Regardless of personal opinion, it looks like Siri is definitely with us in the long-run with iOS, which is why it’s great to see tweaks like Ask Assistant landing on the Cydia store that make using Siri that little bit easier.
Ask Assistant is a relatively straight-forward package that allows jailbroken iOS 5 and iOS 6 users to setup a pre-defined set of questions that we may find ourselves asking Siri on a regular basis. Different people use Siri for different reasons. On a personal level I tend to use the digital assistant while driving to invoke phone calls or compose text messages in a hands-free manner. Other people regularly ask what the weather is like in a specific location or check company stock prices. Whatever your usage might be, the Ask Assistant package will make things a little quicker.
The concept of the tweak is to allow the user to create a list containing five different questions. Each question is assigned to an Activator action method that when invoked automates the Siri process with the question linked to that action. It not only makes the Siri workflow a lot quicker, but it also removes the need to look and feel a bit silly in public if you need to know whether or not you will have to find an umbrella for your trip or locating the nearest public restroom.
Ask Assistant doesn’t install any additional home screen based icons after installation. All configurable set of options are found within the native Settings app on the device making it extremely easy to get up and running right out of the box.
Ask Assistant is available as a free-of-charge download from the BigBoss repository and requires a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 5 or above with Siri capabilities.
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