Apple's new Siri voice recognition system is only officially available to new iPhone 4S users. Predictably, over the past few weeks, there have been various attempts to port Siri to previous generation hardware. The early versions of these hacks, however, simply got the user interface working on the iPhone 4, but were unable to actually use the voice recognition due to authentication issues in connecting to Apple's servers.
Tonight, developers @stroughtonsmith and @chpwn have been able to bypass this hurdle and have been able to get Siri working on previous generation hardware. This video shows it on an iPod Touch:
The video shows just a couple of simple question/answers but seems to run at a good speed. There had been some speculation that Siri might require the A5 processor in the iPhone 4S, but based on these early findings, it seems not.
The developers have said that there will be "no public release soon" and not to ask. A public release also seems unlikely due to the legal issues in repackaging Apple's code and distributing it.
We've since spoken to @stroughtonsmith who told us that despite it working on the iPod Touch, it doesn't work entirely well due to the relatively poor performance of the microphone. "You have to be loud and close to it", he said. However, it does perform quite well on the iPhone 4 and works "just as fast as the 4S".
