Siri has never been more open to customization; until now.
One thing that I'm sure many people want with Siri is the ability to make her as useful as their imaginations can whip up. Let's say, for example, you wanted to have Siri obey commands that you create all by yourself instead of the commands that Apple pre-loads into Siri. If this is the case, then you might want to check out a new jailbreak tweak dubbed MyAssistant by iOS developers Akhil Tolani and Andrea Olivia.
MyAssistant is the first step toward making Siri react to the words that you create - that's right, you can actually program Siri to understand what you mean all by yourself. Maybe program isn't the right word, because Akhil and Andrea already did that part for you, however the only part that is missing is the string that is the command which you say. That's where you come in. MyAssistant lets you punch in the commands that you want to say to Siri to invoke actions. Are you scratching your heads, wondering what I mean? Don't fret; we're going to show you.
After you install MyAssistant and you respring your iDevice (it can be an iPhone 4S or any other iDevice with Spire or some other Siri port installed), you can head right over to your MyAssistant settings in the Settings application and you will find a cluster flock of options before your hands. You will see the screen that we show you below:
So, what kinds of things can you customize Siri to do? The answer is in the sauce. You can customize system toggles, create commands, create Activator events, make Siri reply to you with what you want to hear, and even change Siri's user interface. Is that a big pill to swallow at once or what? We are going to start with the first option which is customizing system toggles. You will see the settings for customizing system toggles below:
System toggles, as you can see from the screenshot above, includes the following: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Location, Airplane Mode, Brightness, and Volume. What you can do from this screen is type in exactly what you want to tell Siri in order for her to invoke the action. So, take toggling Wi-Fi for example. You can type in, "Turn on Wi-Fi" and then speak, "Turn on Wi-Fi", and then Siri will toggle Wi-Fi on for you. Or, you can type in, "Yo Siri, turn my Wi-Fi on now!" and then when you say, "Yo Siri, turn my Wi-Fi on now!" Siri will toggle your Wi-Fi on. This works with all of the toggles in this part of your settings and you can type in anything that you want to say. As soon as Siri hears you say it, she will invoke the proper action accordingly.
What's more is that you can use MyAssistant to set your own commands with Siri. This includes commands such as respring, reboot, power off, safe mode, lock, unlock, taking a picture, playing a song's lyrics, telling you your battery percentage, or even launching applications. Just like settings toggles, you can set your own commands for performing these system actions. You simply type in what you are going to want to say and then later on when you want to perform the action, you say exactly what you typed in. Simple enough? You can see a screenshot of the commands section for MyAssistant below:
If you're still not blown away by the functionality of MyAssistant with Siri, then maybe this will be a game-changer for you. Have you ever noticed that Activator has very limited activation methods? Do you try to keep Activator-based tweaks to a minimum because of that? Well now, you don't have to anymore. With MyAssistant, you can have voice-invoked Activator actions. How would you like to say SBSettings and then Siri opens SBSettings for you? Well, now you have a free Activator action where SBSettings used to be. How convenient! It works with all sorts of other applications that you can download from Cydia requiring Activator as a dependency as well. Below are the settings for using voice as an Activator method, where you tap on the button, add an event, and choose a voice dictation for invoking it:
Another cool part of MyAssistant would be the custom replying feature. You can say anything you want to Siri, and make her say back to you whatever you want her to say. Wow, just think of all the interesting, funny, and awkward things you could make her say. You could make a whole crowd laugh, or you could make Siri insult people. It's all up to you. Basically, you just type in something that you would say to Siri, and then you type in what you want her to say back to you. So let's say you type in, "Hi Siri" for the 'question' even though it's not a question in this instance, and then you type in, "Shut up and go away, human" in the reply - this means that when you say, "Hi Siri" to Siri, Siri will then tell you, "Shut up and go away, human." Pretty nifty, huh? You can have up to 10 different custom questions and replies. You can take a look at the question and answer parts of MyAssistant from the screenshot below:
The last big feature about MyAssistant is that it lets you customize the Siri user interface by changing its background image. We have seen this before with Ori Kadosh's Custom Siri Background, but now you can have it packaged into one tweak with a bunch of other options.
MyAssistant is really like the Springtomize of Siri. If you have Siri, then you really want to check out MyAssistant. It brings a ton of customizable features to Siri that you could never get from Apple. As it stands right now, MyAssistant is very caps sensitive with what you type in. If you aren't careful with the way that you type things, Siri may not understand what you say. It's entirely important to make sure that you spell everything correctly and that you don't put any capital letters or extra spaces where they do not belong because Siri will not understand you when you try to say it if you type it in all strange.
I think that MyAssistant is a pretty great tweak, but it certainly has a lot of wiggle room to grow and improve. I recommend it to all Siri users who are rocking a jailbroken iDevice. As stated earlier in this review, MyAssistant works with Siri ports the same way that it works with the iPhone 4S. This means if you are using Spire, you can use MyAssistant. What are your thoughts about MyAssistant? Let us know what you think about it in the comments.
Name: MyAssistant
Price: 99¢
Version: 1.0
Repo: BigBoss
Developer(s): Akhil Tolani and Andrea Olivia
Editor's Rating: / 4.5/5
Update: Akhil and Andrea have submitted version 1.0.1 to BigBoss which will be live shortly. It fixes many bugs that users have been reporting since its release today.
Sources: Akhil Tolani and Andrea Olivia
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