Open the pod bay doors, Siri!
December 19, 2012 3:30 AM   Subscribe

Hacker sets up SiriProxy and a Raspberry Pi-controlled relay to make his iPhone's Siri voice control open his garage door
posted by Blazecock Pileon (21 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Are we living in the future? I think we just might be.

I love the possibilities in this.
posted by Georgina at 3:39 AM on December 19, 2012


When I was young, my father set me up on the fender of the tractor and used voice control to open and close gates around the farm.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:55 AM on December 19, 2012 [7 favorites]


Siri, how do I detect lying?

Siri, create Facebook poll: should I DTMFA?

Siri, Tweet: why does love hurt so much? :sad smiley:

Siri, recommend bars rated 2 or more.

Siri, rear end cheap Mexican feud.

Siri, why do my genitals itch so much dammit ouch?

Siri, is the toilet seat warm yet?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:12 AM on December 19, 2012


Siri, how do you spell centre? Rideau Centre? No, not Rita Center, you dumbass.
posted by Yowser at 4:59 AM on December 19, 2012


nice!

I'm playing with a raspberry pi at THIS VERY MOMENT compiling a Pi-ready copy of the Sage computer algebra system. We're looking at deploying a few in some with rural Kenyan secondary students to teach programming. I don't have a hdmi-ready monitor or a tv of any kind, so I've been logging into the device through ssh. The network I attach it to is just the wireless hotspot cast by my Android phone. (Hint: it was kinda tricky getting all of the wirelesss set up properly without a screen, but doable. Also I've found that it would be really nice to have a way in Android to see all of the dhcp'ed ip addresses of connected devices, instead of writing a script on the pi to output the ifconfig data to a file.... it would make the ssh process a lot neater over random networks!)

The pi is pretty fun, and really not so far off from my usual laptop setup; I run Xubuntu and have been linux only for a long, long time. I'm happy that there are soon to be many more command-line haax0rs in the near future, thanks to the Pi.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:13 AM on December 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


Beaten to the joke...arrgh
posted by briank at 5:28 AM on December 19, 2012


Hello, Siri. Do you read me, Siri?
Affirmative, DarkTherapy. I read you.
Open the garage doors, Siri.
I'm sorry, DarkTherapy. I'm afraid I can't do that.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:57 AM on December 19, 2012 [3 favorites]


I pictured an interior view of a car pulling into a driveway, the request through Siri, the "open the pod bay doors" moment, and then the car pulling into the garage.

Watching the video I laughed (inside) when I saw the garage was full of junk with no room for a car.

Siri, Now clean out my garage.
posted by achrise at 6:14 AM on December 19, 2012


Can you actually get these?
posted by shothotbot at 6:17 AM on December 19, 2012


I have tried and failed to think of a situation where voice control would be easier and less error prone than just typing it in manually, or pressing a physical switch.
posted by blue_beetle at 6:26 AM on December 19, 2012


I wonder if voice control will turn out to be a short UI fad like handwriting recognition was because the technology just isn't really here yet?
posted by octothorpe at 6:56 AM on December 19, 2012


I can only imagine the RasPi muttering to itself about its fate like Dr. Zachary Smith ... *a man of my intelligence acting as a mere beast of burden* ... and Siri loving it.
posted by Twang at 6:58 AM on December 19, 2012


blue_beetle...I find that, when it comes to these sorts of hacker/maker gadgety creations, making the thing is the entire point, rather than any sort of real, functional improvement over simply pressing a button (which already exists, of course)
posted by Thorzdad at 6:58 AM on December 19, 2012 [2 favorites]


I have found that voice control can be really useful for typing text messages, and Android's implementation (showing the text as you say it instead of waiting until you stop recording) makes it easier to keep your place, but I can't decide if it's faster than Swype/Swiftkey Flow/Google typing gestures. Someone needs to do some science.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 7:12 AM on December 19, 2012


I have tried and failed to think of a situation where voice control would be easier and less error prone than just typing it in manually, or pressing a physical switch.

Setting reminders or alarms is one good example, actually. The set of words that it really needs to recognize is small, and I'm pretty sure that number recognition is prioritized* in the speech recognition engines on both iOS and Android, so it almost always succeeds at both understanding that you want to set a reminder and getting the reminder time correct. If it messes up the actual reminder text it's rarely a big deal. This is usually a good deal faster than going through the several menus or screens that you would need to navigate to set it by hand.

* I am curious as to how this is done, if it's the case. Maybe the training set has a really robust subset of phoneme sequences representing numbers?
posted by invitapriore at 7:28 AM on December 19, 2012


The idea I've been kicking around for my RPi is to set it up as a wireless router (I have a couple extra wireless dongles floating around) for the house, which will automatically attach itself to whichever phone is providing internet in the house, and then forward that internet on to the resident computers. (In western Kenya, the main way to get home internet is through mobile broadband.) I imagine the RP also providing a music server at the same time, so that while you browse the web, you can pop over to localhost to play a song from anywhere in the house.
posted by kaibutsu at 7:29 AM on December 19, 2012


I have tried and failed to think of a situation where voice control would be easier and less error prone than just typing it in manually, or pressing a physical switch.
You realize that's exactly what the ruby code is doing ?

This is one of those things I initially thing "wow, that's really neat", yet when I look at the code, it's all "geeze, all it does it latch the button high for 0.5 seconds, then low" (for both open or close, the action is the same), which then makes me thing "BFD". Scores cool points, but not much on the technical points.

Now, had he hooked up a servo that would drive a bar down to press the button and what not, I'd be a bit more impressed. (cf college roomates that had an automatic door unlock+open or lock mechanism they built)
posted by k5.user at 8:25 AM on December 19, 2012


I'm actually seriously mulling over some ideas for using a Pi and/or a TWINE to help me know what's going on with parts of my rental property and/or when we need to move my Dad home and care for him post-dementia. They may have some real applications versus a lot of MBWA and 24/7 monitoring. This, though, is just a fun project, for pity's sake.
posted by dhartung at 9:28 AM on December 19, 2012


Very clever.

For me, Siri won't be useful until it dramatically improves its accuracy -- I use it for setting alarms and reminders b/c it appears to "get" those without fail, but responding to text messages or things like that the error rate is high enough that my default action is always just to type it out rather than speak it.

Voice recognition on phones still remains in the "proof of concept" stage, I think.
posted by modernnomad at 9:32 AM on December 19, 2012


I think this would be a really, really bad idea for me. Because I was raised to believe that if you don't swear at inanimate objects, they won't learn nothin. So it's all too easy for me to imagine the inevitable moment when I bust out with, "Oh, Siri, blow me!"

Then I'd have to explain to my wife why I've suddenly taken up smoking after phone calls.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:35 AM on December 19, 2012


octothorpe writes "I wonder if voice control will turn out to be a short UI fad like handwriting recognition was because the technology just isn't really here yet?"

Man I loved Graffiti and I've heard the Newton 2.0 input was even better.
posted by Mitheral at 7:55 PM on December 19, 2012


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