Samsung Blocks Unofficial Use Of S-Voice With The Help Of Vlingo

We recently reported that the firmware of Samsung Galaxy S III was recently leaked, letting developers make use of the S Voice APK. S Voice is the voice-based assistant that is part of Galaxy S III. However, Samsung has been quick in responding to this and has worked it out with Vlingo, the service which is powering S Voice. And as a result, anyone not using Galaxy S III can no longer make use of the feature.


The leaked firmware and APK has been working quite well for some hours. It turned out to be treasure-trove when the developers realized that it can be run on a number of other Android devices without any problem.

All this happened a week before Galaxy S III was even launched. Naturally, this would have proved quite bad for Samsung’s business, especially for Galaxy  S III sales. So Samsung was quick to have it fixed.

Vlingo is the company which is powering up the voice assistant, S Voice. It has now limited the use of the service from server side so that only such users who are using it through S III will be able to access it. For the users trying to access it from other phones, they get a network error.

However, this isn’t the end of it and developers are confident that they may be able to find a way around it. This is what the developer at XDA Developers forum posted,

“At the moment we start using S Voice we are sending all the following info to them:

X-vlclient: DeviceMake=samsung; DeviceOSName=Android; DeviceModel=Galaxy Nexus; DeviceOS=4.0.4; Language=en-US; ConnectionType=DirectTCP; Carrier=[my Carrier]; CarrierCountry=[my Country]; DeviceID=[my IMEI]; AudioDevice=Android\r\n

…looks easy to them to deny the requests from the phones other than Galaxy SIII ! and they are doing this obviously, look at the response:

63.116.58.58 10.8.0.1 HTTP 340 HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found
Expert Info (Chat/Sequence): HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found\r\n
404.”

Source: XDA Developers

Courtesy: The Next Web

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Salman

Salman Latif is a software engineer with a specific interest in social media, big data and real-world solutions using the two.Other than that, he is a bit of a gypsy. He also writes in his own blog. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter .

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