Apple Siri Assistant ported to iPhone 4

A proof of concept shows Apple's Siri Assistant, an iPhone 4S exclusive, running on an iPhone 4

An iPhone developer has been working closely with 9to5Mac to bring the Siri Assistant voice control experience from the iPhone 4S to the iPhone 4.

Steven Troughton-Smith managed to install the voice-powered Siri Assistant onto an iPhone 4 and has released a demo video showing it in operation.

Allegedly, when installed on an iPhone 4, Siri will support both the standard Siri voice view and typed keyboard Dictation view, just like on the iPhone 4S. It can also talk back to the user.

There is some noticeable performance impact on the iPhone 4 but 9to5Mac said that this is not the fault of the Siri software:

‘A special GPU driver for iPhone 4 is needed; and it is obviously not included in the iPhone 4S binary cache – where the Siri files are located.’

Apart from this, the main stumbling block is that Apple is not setup to authenticate iPhone 4 based Siri commands via its servers.

The big revelation is that there’s no technical reason, from an in-built hardware perspective, why the iPhone 4 can’t run Siri Assistant. The hardware is capable enough it simply requires some fine tuning in terms of support and for authentication via Apple.

The question is: why has Apple made Siri an iPhone 4S exclusive.

The most obvious, and if we’re honest most likely answer would be to create a unique selling point for the new handset.

Other technical reasons could be to do with the onboard microphone or current authentication support limits at Apple - though this last point seems unlikely.

More generally we suspect it’s a quality control issue, Apple is quite fastidious about releasing demanding software only onto hardware which can run it flawlessly

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