Yes Siri can open your garage door- thanks to Raspberry Pi
Now we have already read the million articles around AI and Siri. And yes it can do cool stuff like remember things and talk about weather and traffic.
But connect Siri to SiriProxy, and Siri can do quite a bit more. If you are a developer you can find the Siri Proxy code on Github here. (You can use the code and create a plugin - provided you know about networks and can get the proxy running.)
Siri Proxy can actually allow you to take Siri to complete more advanced operations.
What about though, if you want to create voice activated commands for more complicated actions. Like say opening your Garage Door using your mobile phone? That's when Raspberry Pi ( the credit card sized micro computer) can come into play.
That's what user, " Dark Therapy" did by connecting Siri Proxy to Raspberry Pi and Wiring Pi.
Quoting him from the Pi Forums
"Hi, this is my first real Raspberry Pi project - SiriProxy running on the Raspberry Pi, along with wiringPi to access the Pi's GPIO pins and turn a relay on/off. The relay is then hooked up to my automatic garage door system. So, I have control of the door with Siri on my iPhone.
There are probably other ways to do the same thing, such as running a web server on the Pi and have that access the GPIO's etc but I basically cobbled this together for my own needs - and it works fine. I am running the Pi as "root" for this whole setup as it just makes things easier for me and I'm using the "wheezy" distro. Follwing the instructions here: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2011/12/09/how-to-install-siri-proxy-tutorial-video/should get SiriProxy up and running, if you do follow these instructions then swap commands 11, 12 and 13 to 12, 13, 11. Command 7 by the way will take about 90 minutes to compile on the pi! Then install wiringPi from https://projects.drogon.net/raspberry-p ... d-install/ Once these are installed its just a case of modifying the example ruby script included with siriproxy. Edit this file: /root/SiriProxy/plugins/siriproxy-example/lib/siriproxy-example.rb"
You can find the detailed code used in this project here.
Here is a video of the final end user experience: Yes as cool as you saying open the Garage door to Siri and voila...it opens. Your mobile becomes your remote.
For those who want to know more about how you can get Siri Proxy running you can chat on #SiriProxy channel on irc.freenode.net or tweet to @plamoni
For more information on Wiring Pi activation. All thanks to Gordon @ Drogon
On Gadgetoid there are now wrappers for Ruby, Python and Perl and these can all befound here.
There are wrappers for Java which can be found here.
TCL wrapper which can be found here.
Pi4J is another Java project that uses WiringPi. It has a Github repository here.
Beyond the tech geekery what makes such experiments so unique, is the end user capability of how tomorrow, more and more actions can be controlled by voice and your mobile phone. How networks and wifi's and phone's can centralize voice commands for a plethora of day to day activities. Marketers need to understand that. Virality is embedded in such experiments. The underlying tech is the strategy based on social and behavioral science.
Now you don't need to be a developer, but you sure would love it if your phone could open your garage door.
Super neat!