How To Get Siri Legally On iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad, iPod touch 4G/3G With Spire

A lot of people were expecting something big from the iOS dev community around Christmas, and like so many other instances, they have not disappointed all the iPhone jailbreak users across the world. A few hours ago, Spire was released, which is a legal port for the much-awaited Siri on unsupported, legacy devices. The world fell in love with Siri as soon as it was released alongside iOS 5. As it was among the most obvious distinguishing features of iPhone 4S, users of older iPhones, iPad and iPod touch wanted it on their devices straightaway, but turned out that it wasn’t legal to port Siri to any other device because of the encryption used in iOS 5. However, with the release of unencrypted keys in one of iOS beta firmwares around Christmas, all such limitations went down the drain, and thanks to the developers of Spire, it is possible to legally use Siri on jailbroken iPhone 4, iPod touch 4G, iPod touch 3G and first gen iPad.

On the surface, using Spire might look like as simple a task as installing a Cydia tweak, but you need to do much more than that before you can have a friendly and helpful chat with Siri. Also, it must be noted that this tweak will only run on devices running iOS 5 jailbroken properly, as semi-tethered jailbreak is not supported. Here are the steps that need to be followed to get Spire up and running on any compatible device.

Instructions:

1. Go to the Cydia store, and from the BigBoss repo, download the newly released Spire package. The tweak uses about 100MB of data, so it is better if you download it over a stable Wi-Fi connection (as suggested by the developer as well).
2. The installation of the tweak will require you to reboot your device. If you’re tethered jailbroken still, you’ll need a tool like redsn0w or iBooty to perform a reboot.
3. After the download and installation procedure is complete, a separate menu will appear for Spire in the Extensions tab of the Settings menu.
4. Now comes the tricky part of using Spire, that is, setting up a proxy server for the tweak. While Spire will install Siri on a device, access to Apple’s official server is still required for Siri to work. Hence, we need to set up a proxy, which will make the server think that your device is actually a 4S. Even though theoretically there are more than one methods for accomplishing this, as you can read here at the developer’s blog, the most intuitive and practical method seems to be the copying of proxy settings from an actual iPhone 4S. Chpwn, the co-developer of Spire, lists some techniques for that on his blog, and you can check them out.

That’s about it. You should now be able to use Siri on on your device. Spire is available for free in the Cydia store’s Big Boss repo.