Cycling, Siri, and more
A smarter Siri, more workouts, and wheely good directions
MANY OF THE changes that Apple introduced in watchOS 7 are about making the Apple Watch a better fit with your life. From new kinds of workout tracking to a much smarter Siri, the Apple Watch is more flexible than ever.
The Activity app is no more: it’s been redesigned and renamed Fitness. But while the core functionality hasn’t changed, the newly named app can track some new kinds of workouts: Dance workouts, Functional Strength Training workouts, Core Training workouts, and your post–workout Cooldown. That makes Fitness useful for an even larger group of people.
Fitness now displays your key data in one page, and the sharing page collages all your Activity competitions and sharing activity.
There’s good news for two–wheeled Apple Watch users: the Maps app now includes cycling directions. The feature is coming to US and Chinese users first (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Shanghai and Beijing) before rolling out worldwide in the coming months. It doesn’t just know about bike lanes but about obstacles such as steps and steep gradients too, and it can warn you about them before you set off. When you’re on your bike, Maps will tell you when you need to dismount.
Next, there’s the improved Siri in watchOS 7. The first big improvement is a really big deal: Siri can deliver instant translations in ten languages, and can play audio (which sounds human, not robotic) if you’re not very confident in your own pronunciation. It’s very quick — we never had to wait more than a second for a translation — and doesn’t require an internet connection or a paired iPhone. It isn’t quite the Babel Fish real-time translator of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The
Galaxy fame, but it’s really useful and a tantalizing glimpse of the future.
Another really welcome feature is on– device processing for Siri Dictation, which delivers noticeable improvements in the speed of requests and of voice–to–text input in apps such as Messages.
Last but not least, there’s watchOS 7’s Siri Shortcuts. This enables you to run shortcuts that you’ve created on your iPhone without needing your phone (unless they’re triggering an iPhone app), which is very handy, and there’s a much wider selection of shortcuts to choose from.
Handier still, you can add shortcuts as complications in selected Apple Watch faces, so for example if you’ve created a bedtime shortcut that turns off various lights and devices you can have it on your Watch face. And, of course, you can trigger your shortcuts by talking to Siri if you’d rather speak than tap. We like the way Shortcuts are available as both full–sized and icon– scale complications, so you can plonk full–size ones in the middle of Infograph Modular or add multiple Shortcuts icons to Utility. As ever, the number of available slots depends on which particular Apple Watch face you select, so for example if you go for the redesigned X–Large face you can only have a single shortcut on screen.
You can ensure that your Apple Watch only gets the Shortcuts you want it to by going into individual Shortcuts’ details in the iPhone app. Here there’s a toggle that you can use to specify whether the selected Shortcut should be made available on your Apple Watch. As before, you can also specify whether it should appear in the iOS Share Sheet. The combination of Siri Shortcuts and complications could well turn out to be the most useful personalization feature in the whole of watchOS.