Hackers are trying hard to make sure Siri gets ported to older Apple devices, interestingly helping making things easier for modding community Apple released a new build of iOS 5.01 for iPhone 4S with decrypted ramdisks leaving the underlying filesystem wide-open to be copied and researched upon. Notable iPhone hacker (from iPhone Dev Team) musclenerd tweeted this news with links to grab the new release.

Siri has been the top feature in Apple iPhone 4S and is not available officially and legally on older Apple phones like iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS, hackers have been trying to get a perfect port of the technology to older devices and it seems the progress is good. In some good development on the porting front a video has not been uploaded to Youtube showing Siri working on an Apple iPhone 3GS - full video after the jump.

The best thing about open-source and crowd-sourcing is that there is no limit to the amount of creativity and development a product/feature can achieve once subject to public development, thanks to SiriProxy Plugin hack independent developers are creating amazing stuff like controlling their rooms, computers, and even cars.

To get things a notch above iPhone Hacker robb created a "Siri Hack" for the Music Hack Day 2011, Robb used the SiriProxy and developed "Notorious Siri" plugin which raps the "Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypnotize song". Full video after the jump.

"Siri" - the only exciting new feature introduced in Apple iPhone 4S has now been hacked and decoded by developers allowing them to program custom handlers for different actions. The "Siri Proxy" hack allows developers to easily add functionality to Siri making it do cool voice controlled actions not built-in natively by Apple.

Developer's can now create "Siri Proxy Plugin's" allowing users to issue custom commands via the "Siri - voice assistant", an excellent demo is shown below where a "plugin" allows the developer to control his computer and a thermostat.

Want to buy the latest Apple iPhone 4S in India via the legal and official channel?, your wait is over as two major Indian cell-carriers Airtel and Aircel have revealed the official availability dates and prices for iPhone 4S in India. Priced at Rs 44,500 for 16GB and Rs 50,900 for 32 GB model (no 64 GB availability for now) the phone is available for pre-order right now and will be retailed from 25 November 2011.

Want to know how "Siri" understands the Indian accent?, just have a look at the video demonstration below :

Siri is definitely the most sought-after and talked about feature of Apple's new iPhone 4S smartphone, the virtual voice-assistant can make calls from a locked screen also when a pass-code is required to unlock the device. This is no security-flaw but is by design and can be disabled as demoed next.

New Apple iPhone 4S features the much talked around "Siri" virtual voice assistant, luckily users having Google Android can benefit for something similar using free android application "Speaktoit Assistant". The user simply needs to ask an question to the assistant and it will perform the requested task like finding information, launching apps, connecting user with various web services - such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc., get maps, search for news and images, look up weather reports, convert currency and measurements, send email, and much more.

Speaktoit Assistant makes use of powerful multi-lingual Google speech-to-speech technology to answer your questions in natural language, performs tasks, and notifying users about important events.

Nobody likes to get their expensive smartphones like Apple iPhone 4S or Samsung Galaxy SII get dropped and damaged. But if you want to know which phone fairs good when dropped from same height, here is a "drop-test" video between the two to get a clear winner - also don't miss the part video part where the tester asks "Siri" (the iPhone 4S virtual assistant feature) about the drop.

While Apple iPhone 4S featured some clever marketing done for their "virtual assistant" software-bot "Siri" but only time will tell how practical the solution will be for common-users specially when it comes to non-native US-English accents. To counter the iPhone 4S feature (Siri) Google has now released the latest version of "Google Translate For Android App" featuring an intelligent and practical feature of "Speech-to-speech" translation between 14 languages to overcome the language barrier, although not exactly similar to "Siri" the technology can be extended further having advantage of multi-accent Google's Voice Recognition technology.

The new Conversation Mode allows a user to speak into their phone’s microphone in their native language, and the Translate app will translate and readout the translation loud - the person you’re speaking with can then reply in their language, and Conversation Mode will translate what they said and read it back to you. The "Google Translate Android App 2.2" now supports translation between English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish languages - a video demonstration of this new feature is posted below.