“Imagine if Apple’s Siri voice-command feature could enable users to control both third-party apps on an iPhone or iPad and external connected devices such as thermostats and light switches,” Chris Nerney reports for CITEworld.
“A quartet of freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania went beyond imagining and recently hacked Siri in a way that allows independent developers to integrate apps’ functionality into Apple’s voice-command feature, and iPhone users to verbally ask external apps to perform tasks,” Nerney reports. “Called GoogolPlex (not to be confused with the corporate headquarters of a certain online search giant, the GooglePlex), the hack took third place in February’s PennApps, an annual hackathon that this year featured more than 1,200 contestants.”
“GoogolPlex was created by Penn students Gagan Gupta, Alex Sands, Ajay Patel and Ben Hsu, who collectively call themselves The Four Loop. They came up with the idea for GoogolPlex while brainstorming for PennApps,” Nerney reports. “The group ‘used a man in the middle exploit and a proxy server to intercept Siri requests and redirect them through our own server and user natural language processing to teach Siri new tricks,’ as it explains on the PennApps site. ‘Installation works on any iOS device, even non-jailbroken ones, and it takes less than a minute.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]