How Apple put its weight behind App Shortcuts in iOS 16

Apple released automatic App Shortcuts to power every action from your apps — here's how this new Shortcuts feature plays into its Siri strategy.
Photograph of the App Shortcuts feature open on an iPhone, with a bookshelf in the background showing the corner of Shortcuts' original logo as the Workflow app as artwork on the shelf.

Yours truly for iMore:

Apple released iOS 16 on Monday and with it the latest update to their Siri Shortcuts feature, this time making “App Shortcuts” automatically available to users when they install supported apps. With App Shortcuts, users can speak the trigger phrases of no-setup shortcuts that are now generated ahead of time and found in the Shortcuts app, acting as pre-programmed Siri commands for everything you might want to do in that app.

As I wrote at the beginning of the summer, App Shortcuts is Apple’s big bet on Siri, switching from the top-down model of defining “intents” in specific categories that Apple needed to build ahead of time and lay out a path for certain types of apps to work with Siri. Now, the “App Intents” feature that powers App Shortcuts gives developers the control, defining every way their app might be used with Siri and automatically creating every permutation of that action as individual shortcuts for the user.

With iOS 16 now live (and our iOS 16 review ready for you to, er, review), and developers releasing their App Shortcuts into the wild, here’s how you can expect to see more Siri Shortcuts throughout your experience, plus how to best take advantage of what’s possible.

Read the full article on iMore.

Posts You Might Like

Why the Menu Bar is the best way to get started with Shortcuts for Mac
Shortcuts for Mac lets you run shortcuts from the Menu Bar. Here's how to set it up, optimize your shortcuts, and add advanced interactivity for your macOS experience.
Apple iOS 18 Siri AI Update Will Let Users Control Features in Apps With Voice »
Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reports on new Siri-focused features coming at WWDC, including mentions of App Intents as a potential basis for these upgrades.
iOS 16 public beta adds 46 new Shortcuts actions for Focus Filters, Background Removal, Parked Cars
In the first public beta of iOS 16, Shortcuts has a whole new set of actions to build with — here's what's available (so far).
Why summer is the best time to get into Shortcuts