One of the most compelling reasons to own an iPhone 4S is the voice assistant known as Siri. Siri does some awesome stuff, but what if you could make Siri even more awesome with a simple tweak? From the beginning, people have messed with Siri using proxies, but for the average user, that is too much work. Thankfully, there is Assistant Extensions for owners of jailbroken iPhones.

This extension removes many of Siri’s limitations and allows you to do things you never imagined possible. As I said before, Siri is awesome, but like so many other things on the iPhone, it is arbitrarily limited. Thankfully, jailbreaks allow you to remove many of these limitations. It took almost no time after the iPhone 4S was jailbroken for the community to release an amazing Cydia tweak that extends Siri's core functionality now, and opens a whole slew of options for the future.

Installation

Assistant Extensions is available in the BigBoss repository, which is one of the default Cydia repositories. Simply search Cydia for Assistant Extensions, click on it and click “Install” on the top right corner of the screen. You can also check out their official website. When finished, Cydia will prompt you to respring your phone.

Once it is finished respringing, you will be ready to take Siri to a new level.

What Can It Do?

Out of the box, the app can do many awesome things. Using this tweak, you will be able to compose a new tweet with Siri. Simply say “tweet” and the text of the tweet, and Siri will compose and send your tweet for you. If you want to see your tweet before it is sent, then you will need to say, “show tweet” and then the text of the tweet. This will open a box with the tweet, so you can make sure Siri got it right before sending.

I cannot really understand why Siri cannot tweet out of the box, but with Assistant Extensions, she can.

Using Assistant Extensions, Siri can launch applications. Both regular and jailbreak apps can be launched using Siri. Simply say “Launch” or “Open” and the name of the app, and Siri will quickly launch that app for you.

You can also use Siri in conjunction with SbSettings. You can toggle on and off various system options using this awesome app. You can say, “Turn on Bluetooth,” for example, which obviously turns Bluetooth on. For a complete list of available toggles say “List toggles” to Siri, and she will happily tell you everything she can turn on and off and their current status.

If you are feeling bored you can also say, “Should I...” and something you would like to do. Who knew Siri could also be a magic 8-ball? You can also just make Siri say stuff. Just tell her, “say...” and what you want her to say. It is somewhat useless, but fun nonetheless.

Are you lonely? Well, why not have a conversation with Siri? Simply say “let’s chat” and wait a few moments for Siri to load herself into chat mode. Once she says she is ready, you can chat about pretty much anything. Now, this is important, when you are done talking with Siri make sure to say “goodbye” because when she is in chat mode she will not do any of her normal functions. Saying “goodbye” gets her back to regular Siri mode.

The Future

What makes this application stand out above the rest is the fact that people can create their own extensions for Siri, as long as they know how to program (which I don’t). This opens up the application to endless possibilities of what people can make Siri do. As an example, the developer included a tweak that allows you to search YouTube from Siri. Simply say, “search......on YouTube” and Siri will pop up a list of matching results.

The developer of the app put a list of ideas for things that Siri could do, and I must say that any of these would be awesome, and I am sure creative-minded members of the jailbreak community will come up with some even better ones. Check out his list of ideas:

• Complete social network integration (what's new on Facebook, post on Facebook....)
• Chat bots.
• Completing original Apple intentions like local search for countries where it is not yet available.
• Search for known sites like IMDB, eBay....
• Remote controllers - control your Mac/Apple TV with Siri.
• Translators (it was made already; check out Lingual on Cydia now).

As you can see, the possibilities are endless. It has already done some pretty amazing things, and as more and more developers start implementing their own take, this could become one of the best Cydia tweaks ever made.