Siri Developer Contest Produces a Trio of Tasty Hacks

November 29, 2011
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A few weeks ago we let loose our developer community on Siri, the iPhone 4S virtually assisting sensation that has been the subject of several tasty Twilio hacks.  Using Twilio SMS, Siri can be easily bent to the developer’s will, allowing you to tell your iPhone to do your very bidding.  With no official API and proxies only now starting to become available for developers to turn their speech into awesome, Twilio is increasingly the go-to tool to get Siri to do something new fast.

The contest was heated with a number of great entries, three of which were so great we decided to hook them all up with this week’s prize, the brand new Kindle Fire.

One Half of Order Pizza

Roger Pincombe produced the perennial fave of Twilio hackers, a start on a hack that gets Siri to Order Pizza.  While lacking connection to a pizza provider, Roger’s hack lets Siri take your natural language order and produces an easy-to-use data structure that a pizza provider can plugin easily into their backend.

Roger’s inventive hack can be seen demonstrated here:

Siri, Make Me Laugh

Siri is serious business – too serious if you ask me, but fortunately Evan Jacobs delivers a solution with his contest entry.  His submission Silio turns Siri into a fountain of funny by letting you search and play funny audio clips.  Evan got extra points for us for the simplicity of his interface and the pain point he was solving.

Anything that gets us from zero to Simpsons in a few seconds is fine by us:

Siri. Beer Me.

Finally, our award for best cinematography goes to longtime Twilio developer Drew Baumann for his entry, Beer Me.  At the liquor store and not sure if that Coney Island Freaktoberfest is going to be your style?  Drew’s app let’s you ask Siri for advice on the beer you’re about to drink, texting you back a beer rating to let you know if it is worth taking the plunge.

We’re ready to nominate Drew for Best Director in a Developer Contest Short:

Your Turn

Want to hack your way to glory?  Be sure you check out our Shopify contest this week.  Entries close for submission in two weeks – get cracking!