Siri Tweaks

HiddenHelper, the new jailbreak tweak for the iPhone, allows you to use Siri without the Siri interface popping up on your Home screen. This can be helpful when you want to set your alarm or dictate a note on your iPhone while you are using the device for something else, and you don't want Siri to interrupt. For example, Siri will not interrupt your Angry Birds game by displaying the note you just dictated to her. It's a great multitasking tool.

HiddenHelper also allows you to decide which Siri snippets you want displayed, and which snippets you want disabled. Asking Siri to tell you about the weather is useless without the UI because Siri displays the temperature instead of reading it to you. Wolfram Alpha queries are also pointless without Siri displaying the results.

One of my biggest gripes with Siri has been fixed thanks to a new jailbreak tweak called PersistentAssistant. The new jailbreak tool allows Siri to keep listening after you ask her a question. This eliminates the need to keep tapping the button every time you want to use Siri, allowing you to have a continuous conversation with the voice assistant.

This is the perfect tweak for impatient people who are always turning Siri on and off before she has time to do her job. It's also great for those drunk nights when you're trying to show her off to your friends because it makes her much easier to use. You can tap Siri a second time or let her automatically shutdown if you only have one question.

Here is a great Cydia add-on for international travelers. International Locations for Siri allows Siri to perform local searches outside of the U.S.. While Siri can speak several languages, and is also available in other countries, location based services are currently only available in the U.S..

I obviously can't test the tweak without leaving the country, but the $0.99 investment may be worth the risk to some frequent travelers. The add-on is available for download via the BigBoss repo. If you do not already have AssistantExtensions it will be installed when you download the tweak.

Tweaks to Siri have been cropping up regularly thanks to the untethered iPhone 4S jailbreak. AssistantExtensions in the Cydia app store is available for free, and makes it possible to add all kinds of useful conversations to Siri's repertoire. We've seen add ons to ask SIri questions about jailbreaking and have her announce the latest sports scores and schedules.

Now thanks to BatteryLevelAE, iPhone owners can ask Siri battery-related questions such as "How much talk time do I have?" Siri will respond with a rough estimate of how much juice is left on the battery for both 3G and 2G network connections.

If you're not a fan of official sports apps like me, then the new AssistantExtensions addon called SiriSports might be what you're looking for. The jailbreak tweak enables Siri to deliver sports scores and schedules for the NBA, NHL and MLB.

SiriSports is located for free in the BigBoss repo. Once installed and enabled in Settings, you can ask Siri things like: "What's the score of the Knicks game" or "Did the 76ers win last night?" Siri will then give you the latest or final scores of the game you're looking for, instead of suggesting a web search.

Siri9000 is a useless but fun jailbreak tweak that transforms Siri into HAL 9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Hal icon is easily installed by downloading the tweak from the Big Boss repo, and activating it from WinterBoard. Getting the Hal 9000 sound effects to work takes a little bit more effort.

I should warn you that the tweak does not convert Siri's voice into Hal's. It only changes the Siri start up sound to a few Hal quotes from the movie ("Good evening Dave", "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"). To activate the Hal 9000 sounds you will have to know how to transfer files on your iPhone with SSH and have OpenSSH installed.

Have you ever wanted to launch Siri without using the home button? The new jailbreak tweak SiriBoard adds an icon to your iPhone's SpringBoard so you can launch the voice assistant from your home screen. I prefer the app to holding down the home button because it only requires that you tap the icon. It also gives you two options to access Siri rather than just one.

The popular Siri tweak AssistantExtensions has received an update. The Jailbreak FAQ Addon gives Siri the ability to answer your jailbreaking questions. Reading Siri an error message will prompt her to explain the problem and offer a fix. The addon will even answer questions about iTune errors that you may encounter while updating.

If you are new to AssistantExtensions it is available for free in the BigBoss repo. The Siri tweak adds built-in custom conversations, the ability to add your own Siri questions and responses, and it even teaches Siri to launch apps and search for YouTube videos.

MyAssistant is one of the more popular jailbreak tweaks that allows you to do all kinds of great things like change Siri's background and create custom conversations. Co-creator Andrea Oliva announced on Monday that the tweak will be receiving an update to add even more features and a few bug fixes.

Version 1.1 will give Siri the ability to download, open apps easier and send tweets. Most of these functions are available for Siri via other jailbreak tweaks, but MyAssistant delivers them all plus more for the low price of $0.99. Check out the complete list of changes and fixes below.

Several reports about Apple altering its requirements for Siri are causing people to wonder if the company is trying to block non-iPhone 4S devices from using the voice assistant. A new token is causing a problem for owners who are trying to connect using jailbreak tools like Spire.

Originally to get Siri to work on an non-iPhone 4S device you only needed a sever host and iPhone 4S certificate. However, according to several forums and Twitter, Apple has added a SetActivationToken which is causing issues with 3rd party servers. Thankfully their seems to be a temporary workaround.