Siri: your shortcut to everything
IOS 12 helps you do more of what you do, without constantly opening apps
Last year, Apple bought Workflow, a brilliant automation app from a small team led by Ari Weinstein ( twitter.com/ariX), the former iPhone jailbreaker who also co-created VotePlz, a tech platform that helped first-time voters get to the polls in the 2016 US election. We now know that Workflow will evolve into an official app called Shortcuts, but that’s still in the future. For now, iOS 12 gets automation in the form of suggestions that appear on your Lock screen and in Spotlight searches, generated by your own actions. The ultimate time-saver Siri Shortcuts, for the moment, consist of single tasks that you could carry out in a particular app. A shortcut might do something as simple as opening a Music playlist, or — where developers choose to build in advanced support — it might be as clever as noticing you order the same food delivery every Friday and popping up to ask if you want to repeat it. This could obviously involve some personal data processing, but that’ll be done within the app, which you’re already trusting, and any data passed to iOS is kept securely on your device, inaccessible to other apps.
It’s branded as part of Siri not only because of the machine learning element, but because you can set up voice commands for Shortcuts. For now, that means accepting a suggested task and assigning a phrase to it, but later you’ll be able to create your own custom shortcuts. The Workflow app makes it easy to string together a sequence of steps, which might involve several apps, and could even bring up iOS-style alerts, dialogs and text input boxes to let you interact during the process. There are no details yet on what the Shortcuts app will bring, but the first demo of Siri Shortcuts at WWDC, by Apple’s Kimberly Beverett, looked very promising indeed.
This kind of feature is often loved by a few keen users and ignored by everyone else, but it’s clever of Apple to kick it off as something that actively pops up suggestions that you can simply tap to adopt, and anyone who regularly uses Siri will find extra voice commands for tasks appealing. It also works on HomePod and CarPlay. macOS already has the very powerful Automator utility, but there’s surely a place for the simplicity of Shortcuts on the Mac, too.