Creating Shortcuts That Accept Voice Input

When creating Shortcuts for the Mac or iOS you can use voice input easily when you trigger the Shortcut with Siri.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use Shortcuts with your voice to provide input.
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So a short time ago I did a tutorial that showed you how to use Shortcuts to add data to the end of a Numbers spreadsheet. That prompted some people to ask me if there was a way you could use your voice to provide that data rather than having to type it. Actually Shortcuts works very well like this but it's not obvious how to do this especially if you're on a Mac. The trick is that there is nothing special you need to do. The same actions you use to accept typed input can be used to accept voice input if triggered by Siri.
So let's create a new shortcut here. Now the first thing I want to do is I want to name the shortcut. It's very important to choose your name wisely if you plan to use the shortcut with Siri because you trigger the shortcut using the exact name. So I could do something like Take a Note but actually Siri already responds to that. I want to add to this existing note. Let's call this Add To Voice Note. Something Siri can't confuse with anything else. 
Now what I want to do is I want to ask for input. So I'm going to search for Ask over here and there's Ask For Input. I can ask for text with prompt like that. Now if I run this it's going to prompt me to type something which is not what we want to do. We want to have Siri prompt us so we can speak the text. So, how do you change this to make it so that it accepts voice input not typing input? Well, the answer is you don't have to change anything at all. When you trigger this with Siri this will not prompt you for text on the screen that you type with your keyboard. It will prompt you to speak the text. 
So, let's go and finish this off with a search for note. There's Find Notes. What we want to do is find All Notes and add a Filter. All Notes with Name Containing and let's create a special note that we'll use for this. I'll call this Verbal Notes. Over here in the Notes App I already created Verbal Notes. So this name matches exactly. So this will find that one note and then we want to append to Note. 
Now the Append command will actually do some odd things here. It will try to append a note that is here to another note. We don't want to do that. So I'll click here and Clear. Now this is empty. We want to Append Text. I'm going to Control Click, or two-finger click on this, select Magic Variable, and select to provide input. Then I'm going to click here, select Magic Variable and select the found notes. So it's going to ask us for text. It's going to find this note with the exact name. Then it's going to append the text we typed or spoke to that note. 
Let's try this out just here by running it. It's going to prompt us to type something. We'll type something just to test. Done. You can see it works and appends this here. But we want to be able to speak this and have it work. Well, we really don't need to do anything else to set this up. Right here we don't need to pin it in the bar, use it as a Quick Action, or set it up for anything. Siri already will look for a shortcut for something that you speak its name. So let's give this a try. I'm going to click here to invoke Siri and then use this name here to invoke the shortcut. 
Add to voice note. Siri responds, Shortcut says what would you like to add. Something else. Siri -That's done.
So you can see how it easily added that. It was a bit awkward that way it asked but watch what happens when I try it again. 
Add to voice note. Siri responds, what would you like to add. Hello world. Siri -Done
So it's less awkward the second time you do it. 
The great thing about this is this works on the iPhone and iPad the same way. As a matter of fact since Shortcuts are shared through iCloud this is already on my iPhone and my iPad and I can invoke Siri. I could even use the Voice Activation for Siri if I had that enabled on my device. Ask it to trigger Add To Voice Note by speaking that and it will prompt me to speak something which then it will add to this note which also is in iCloud. So I can already use this shortcut and this note across all my Apple devices. 
So let's take a look at this record event into a spreadsheet that I created before. I'm going to take this shortcut and duplicate it like that and then I'm going to double click it to enter. I'm going to simplify the name here to record event. Then I'm going to replace this selection from the list here with that Ask command. Ask For Input. So it's going to ask for text with prompt. Then I'm going to change the chosen item here so it's actually going to add this provided input as text here. It's going to put that at the bottom of this spreadsheet. So let's give this a try. 
Record event. Siri -What would you like to record? This is a test. Siri -One moment. 
So you could see here it recorded what I spoke. 
This definitely opens up a lot of possibilities for using Shortcuts to record events, or to choose items based on what you speak. You can use that Ask For Input command for all sorts of different things. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “Creating Shortcuts That Accept Voice Input”

claudio

2 years ago

That is really cool... Sure creates a whole array of options... thanks for this one brother!

Gustavo

Great topic! I tried to use similar to Reminder and works. The questions is, however, how can I input 2 variables in same "dictation". In example, I want to add apples to "Grocery" List, or add pencils to "School" List: The simple statement: "add apples to Grocery" or " add pencils to School" will not work. I have to specify the List (verbally), and then input the "apples". I know Siri sometimes understand when you input 2 different things ("new alert for tomorrow during lunch'). How can I?

Gary Rosenzweig

Gustavo: You can't, not in a Shortcut.

Brian

1 year ago

Well, this is a bit annoying. I’d like to add an NFC tag near my thermostat that if scanned triggers a shortcut that prompts the user for “Heat, Cool, or Off” and accepts voice response. But if the tag triggers it, it would show a prompt on screen, not by voice. Apple really knows how to gum up things.

Brian: But why use an NFC tag for that at all? It would be an extra step. Just trigger the Shortcut with Siri in the first place.

Dan Hays

Gary, nice tutorial. Excellent opportunities with this feature. I am puzzled however as I watch the video regarding the apparent kybd shortcut that you used to modify the first "ask" step to get "ask for text prompt". Can you elaborate?
Looking forward to exploiting the capability! Thanks!

Dan: Not sure what you mean. Do you mean right at 1:29? All I do is click where it says "Prompt" and type "What Would You Like To Add?" to replace it. I don't make you wait while I type each letter individually, but that's all I am doing, typing.

Neil

12 months ago

Since 16.2, iPhone shortcut doesn’t take voice input to “Ask for TEXT with PROMPT” as expected. It seems to need a ‘termination’ condition as it repeats the prompt over and over in a loop. Repeating voice input eventually leads to it displaying:

Input text >

Prompt?

Again.

This same shortcut does exactly what is expected with non-Siri launch and keyboard input.

The entire shortcut “Log Weight” is:

Ask for Text with Num?
Get numbers from Provided Input
Log Health Sample

Nick

10 months ago

@Neil, I also had this problem.

The upgraded to 16.3 resolved it for me on my iPhone 13

Comments Closed.

Creating Shortcuts That Accept Voice Input

Comments: 9 Responses to “Creating Shortcuts That Accept Voice Input”

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