Be the envy of Apple fanatics on your street with a bit of hardware hacking.

(Credit: Image by Christopher MacManus/CNET)

Despite owning an iPhone 5 for several months, I find myself using Siri only when someone else wants to see how it works.

A video created by a Raspberry Pi enthusiast motivates me to learn about Siri’s unadvertised side — as a place where hackers can use special software to teach Apple ‘s voice assistant new commands. One such person found a compelling use for the $35 Linux-based Pi and Siri: the ability to open a garage door with a push of a button and a simple spoken sentence.

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The Siri garage door hack comes from engineer Neil Jolley, a U.K.-based tinkerer who originally shared the project on the Raspberry Pi forums. Jolley tapped the highly customizable (and tiny) Raspberry Pi computer to run SiriProxy — software that allows the user to customize and add functionality to Siri — and wired Pi to control the garage door system.

Want to emulate this geeky project? … [Read more]