Dev iPhone

While there are countless people out there who appreciate what Siri has been able to bring to the iPhone in terms of functionality, there are always those of us who feel that her competences could be brought to the next level. Agreeing with this philosophy is iOS developer John Coates, who created a new jailbreak tweak dubbedAssistantLove to make Siri more suitable under very regular circumstances.

AssistantLove can be enabled and disabled on demand, as well as each of its individual features. AssistantLove makes it achievable for you to use a third party GPS application to ask Siri for directions – Siri will then launch your third party GPS application with your directions query all loaded up for you and ready to give you turn-by-turn navigation. John tells me that the TomTom, Waze, and Motion-X GPS applications work with AssistantLove and that support for Motion-X GPS Drive and Navigon will be released very soon. All you need to do is invoke Siri and ask something along the lines of, “How do I get to Sacramento, California?”:

TomTom™ used in the image above. Note: If you don’t have a GPS application, the GPS section in settings will be grayed out.

AssistantLove does much more than allow Siri to give you turn-by-turn directions based on a query, but it also gives Siri Spotify integration. Yes, finally we can use Siri to have a song start playing in Spotify instead of the Music application – I have personally been waiting for this functionality myself for a very long time and it works great! You simply invoke Siri and say something like, “Play ‘Rise Against’.” Siri will then launch Spotify with the artist or song that you queried all loaded up and it will even start playing all by itself:

The final part of AssistantLove has to do with allowing you to launch applications. By default, if you sought to launch the Cydia application for instance (after installing AssistantLove), you would invoke Siri say something along the lines of, “Launch Cydia” and the Cydia application would proceed to launch. While that’s a decent feature, John took AssistantLove a step further and made it so that you can launch applications under aliases. What this means is if you assign the alias ‘best app ever’ to the Cydia application for instance, then saying something along the lines of, “Launch best app ever’ would open the Cydia application. You can assign any application any alias that you desire to. AssistantLove will understand you:

AssistantLove includes features such as toggling Wi-Fi on and off, toggling Bluetooth on and off, enabling your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S LED flashlight feature, and even toggling mono-audio on and off. The developer promises that many more features are to come and if there is ever a feature that you want to see, you can create a feature request right through the Settings application.

AssistantLove is absolutely one of the better Siri extensions that I’ve ever used. The Spotify integration sold me on it instantaneously, however the addition of GPS turn-by-turn technology with Siri just makes things even better. If you’re on the road, you want to be able to just invoke Siri and make her do the work for you – especially if you’re misplaced and driving. The GPS feature does not work with the Maps application and frankly, Google Maps is horrendous for giving directions. I highly recommend AssistantLove for Siri users – it will work with Spire too and requires iOS 5.

Name: AssistantLove
Price: $1.99
Version: 1.1.0-2
Repo: BigBoss
Developer: John Coates
Editor’s Rating:  5/5

Via iTEchblogger