Siri is one of the best features of iOS and has been receiving updates over the years to become a better digital personal assistant. It can do a lot of things from setting an alarm to searching the web for you, but one thing that I don’t like about Siri is how it covers the entire screen.
The reason Siri appears as fullscreen is so that you can view its response and any necessary information that it displays. But at certain times, there may be no need to take a look at the response because Siri speaks it out to you. This is why a new jailbreak tweak called TinySiri has been developed to offer a better user experience.
What this tweak does is that it displays Siri as a small banner at the top of the screen rather than occupying the entire screen. The banner displays the Siri waveform and its animation only. If you’d like to view Siri’s response, you can perform a swipe up or swipe down gesture at the bottom of the banner to view it in fullscreen.
The tweak also provides an option to view Siri in fullscreen only when it replies back. This means that when you invoke Siri, it will be displayed as a banner. However, when it replies back, it will switch to fullscreen so that you can view its response.
You can access TinySiri’s configurations via its dedicated preferences pane in Settings. It offers the following options:
- Enable or disable the tweak on demand
- Choose the banner position
- Blur the background whenever the banner is displayed
- Show Siri in fullscreen whenever there is a response
- Adjust the banner height
TinySiri is currently in beta which means that it may contain a number of bugs. One issue that I faced is that the banner wouldn’t change to fullscreen whenever I performed a swipe up or swipe down gesture on it. Hopefully all the known issues would be fixed by the time TinySiri comes out of beta.
TinySiri is an amazing tweak and if you wish to give it a try, it can be downloaded for free from the developer’s repo: http://repo.sparkservers.co.uk . Let us know what you think about it once you give it a try.
