Siri Hack Allows You to Control Your Home Via Voice

When Siri debuted on the iPhone 4S, the excitement surrounding the voice-recognition system was palpable. But some were still asking: When will I be able to pretend I'm in that movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and issue the command, "Open the pod bay doors, Siri"? Now, thanks to an enterprising hacker from Australia, that day may have arrived sooner than anyone expected.

Marcus Schappi calls his system the Ninja board, and he's using it to control nearly everything in his home. I spoke to Schappi about the Ninja board and the self-effacing Aussie is optimistic about bringing it to the commercial market. "We're hoping to have something ready by early next year," said Schappi. "What we were wanting to do is build a microcontroller for the rest of us. Arduino [an open-source single-board microcontroller] is great for people with tech skills but, but if you want something for the home, you need microprocessor, IT and networking skills."

The video (see below) shows Schappi turning a lamp on and off using only his voice via Siri and the Ninja board. He then goes on to open a Web page via voice. But one trick that you won't see in the video is Schappi's latest hack—opening the pod bay doors! "We've actually just hacked the locks on our home to have a remote control," says Schappi. "So now we can ask Siri to lock and unlock our front door."

Schappi started Little Bird Electronics as a hobby with his wife Madeleine in 2007, but the effort soon turned into a real business, distributing boutique electronics online. Now the pair hope to land investment money to speed up Ninja's introduction to the global market, applying to sources such as Startmate, a organization Schappi describes as the YCombinator of Australia.

While Ninja isn't a true artificial intelligence system like the one shown in Stanley Kubrick's iconic film, Schappi says, "It is a baby step to that reality. And it's actually more than that. It gives Apple a way to bypass Google's dominance in search. If you're asking 'where is a local restaurant,' you would normally do that with Google search, but now you can just ask Siri."

The system combines the iPhone 4S Siri with Arduino, the Beagle Board (an open-source hardware single-board computer), and the Siri Proxy plugin. "The real hard work was done by the guys who did Siri Proxy. What they did was quite remarkable," says Schappi. The Ninja board system will combine these components into a unit the size of a deck of cards with two ports, making it a simple plug-and-play solution for controlling your home via voice. A specific price has yet to be decided upon, but they are hoping to keep it under $150. To see the Ninja board in action, check out the video below.

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