Hey Siri

HeySiri brings untethered ‘Hey Siri’ support to older devices

Anthony Bouchard ∙ February 4, 2019

The latest iPhones and iPads are now so power efficient that you can effectively say “Hey Siri” whenever you want and have instant hands-free access to your virtual assistant; but that’s not the case with some of Apple’s older devices. Those such as the iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and iPhone 6 Plus require that you be tethered to a power source for Hey Siri to work.

Albeit inconvenient, the chips in the aforementioned devices aren’t as power-efficient as those found inside of devices today; consequently, always-on Hey Siri would have an adverse impact on your battery performance. But if battery life is no object to you, then you can forcefully-enable Hey Siri on these handsets with a free jailbreak tweak dubbed HeySiri by iOS developer Julio Verene.

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How to change which HomePod listens to your commands when using paired HomePods

Sébastien Page ∙ November 22, 2018
A photo showing a finger resting on the HomePod top with the Siri orb animation

If you have two HomePods that are paired to create a stereo setup, only one of these HomePods will be used to listen to your voice queries. When saying a command such as "Hey Siri, what time is it in London?", only that HomePod will be listening to you although the other HomePod might be physically closer to you.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to manually select what HomePod is the dominant one during the initial pairing process, but there is a way to swap which one will actively listen to you once the stereo pair has been created.

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This tweak automatically dismisses Siri when she sits idle for too long

Anthony Bouchard ∙ September 20, 2018

Depending on how you use Siri throughout your workflow, you might find a new free jailbreak tweak called AutoDismissSiri by iOS developer Andreas Henriksson to be an advantageous supplement to your jailbroken handset.

Just as the tweak’s name implies, AutoDismissSiri adds a timeout period to the Siri interface. That said, if Siri would idle on your device for a specific amount of time, then the interface closes automatically.

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