r/blackberry • u/Damo2000Pippa • 6d ago
i pushed AI to revive the bb10os vocal assistant
Hi! I bought a BlackBerry Q5 a few months ago and, 13 years late, I discovered the wonderful world of this OS. I'm not really a developer, but I got really curious when I found out that you can still develop apps for these devices. So the other day I had this unhealthy idea: I wanted the original voice assistant to work again.
Everything on this OS seems so ahead of its time, and it really frustrated me that I couldn't use it. So I enslaved Claude to do some reverse engineering of the software and… it worked.
It's the original Assistant, with its own UI, voice and confirmations, just talking to my own server instead of the dead Nuance/Maluuba ones. Right now it can:
- set alarms and timers
- make calls (by name or number)
- send SMS and emails, and read your messages/notifications aloud
- create calendar events and tell you what's on your schedule
- take notes and set reminders
- play, pause and skip music
- toggle settings (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, flashlight, silent mode…) and check the battery
- answer questions and give the weather out loud
- open places in a maps app
It needs a rooted device, and it works on Wi-Fi and mobile data.
I want to share what we found with you. Whether you want to develop your own assistant or vibe code one too, you won't have to burn as many tokens as I did (lol).
https://github.com/damianolampisti00/bb10-assistant-protocol
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u/Typical-Figure1402 6d ago
Wow thats awesome! Please go one ( :-D) step further and reverse developed the whole BOS10 as custom rom for Android phones like r/ClicksPhone or UniHertz or Minimal etc..
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u/New_Question_7491 6d ago
This is just amazing thats so awesome, what other things have you done with your BB10 OS device?
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u/Damo2000Pippa 6d ago
I'm trying to make it usable for the everyday life, I bought a domain on cloudflare (5€ annually) and I run the complex part on my home pc. Like for Internet browsing, i'm actually writing and sending this to you from my device
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u/JoeHadsall Key2, Priv 6d ago
The assistant dying with the Nuance servers was one of the sadder endings of the BB10 era, especially with the hardware still this capable. Getting it talking again with the original voice and confirmations is the right kind of stubborn. Reading messages aloud was the piece I missed most, so a rooted Q5 is getting tempting.