Google Now, a Siri-besting voice assistant, is hotly innovative feature from Google. Unveiled alongside Jelly Bean operating system, it was believed to be running on Jelly Bean devices. But folks over at XDA Developers already worked hard to making work it on non-Jelly Bean devices.

Yes! Google Now has been ported to Ice Cream Sandwich devices, which are already rooted. In short, this only works on AOSP ICS ROMs and you might need something like CM9 or else to work with.

At the moment, this is APK available and everything apparently works fine alongside Google’s smarter Knowledge Graph integration, though Voice is still broken. However, awesome devs over at XDA forum are still making progress and they’ll get it all sorted out soon.

To get it up and running, download the APK and perform the following steps:

1. Open Root Explorer or another root-enabled file explorer and go to /system.
2. Tap the “Mount R/W” button, then scroll down to build.prop and press and hold on it. Tap “Open in Text Editor”.
3. Find the line that says ro.build.version.sdk=15 and change it to read ro.build.version.sdk=16. Press the menu button and tap “Save and Exit”.
4. Go to /system/app and hold-press GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk. Rename it toGoogleQuickSearchBox.apk1. If that file doesn’t exist (it didn’t for me), just skip this step.
5. Reboot your phone and install the Google Now APK, once again available here.
6. Go back and edit build.prop as described in step two, and change the ro.build.version.sdk line back to 15.
7. Reboot your phone one last time.

Note: For more directions and install file click here. You can go to XDA thread forum to download Google Now for Ice Cream Sandwich.