[jakubw]

I wonder if there are any characteristics about the microphone in Apple devices that the servers could check the audio against to prevent this sort of a thing. There should be a way to somewhat distinguish the device used to record a stream given Apple's control over the devices on which Siri runs and overcoming that would be hard enough for anyone to bother.

[icebraining]

Maybe, but what's the point? If you try to run a service on top of this, you'll have to make so many requests that you'll either have your ID banned or you'll need to buy so many iPhones that you might as well contract a speech-to-text service to some company.

If you're just using it for personal reasons, why should Apple care?

[jakubw]

What I had in mind were not services but rather Siri clients for non-Apple hardware, which I assume Apple would not be particularly happy about. When Siri comes to iPads and Macs, owners of a much broader range of devices could take an ID and use it, for instance, in an unofficial Siri client (should one be created) on an Android device. But then again, I may be way overthinking this.

[hmottestad]

Probably. Take note of the fact that OS X editions don't use a serial number. You can very easily share them with friends and family and online. Same goes for iWork, however some of the more expensive software does use SN.

If you already bought an iphone/mac/ipad (in the future) that has Siri, then I don't think apple will care much if you use siri on other devices. However what is really useful with siri is where it talks to the os layer and other applications. That kind of integration isn't all that easy to do.

So if someone writes an app with the integration to the os and apps (calendar, sms, phone, phonebook...) and decide to use Siri (illegally), then I think they deserve a medal or soemthing for their hard work for porting the siri front end to another platform.

[schiffern]

Duplicating Siri involves much more than just speech-to-text -- the language understanding is the hard part. Heck, Google has its own speech-to-text servers.