Using Siri Shortcut Suggestions

I think the most powerful new feature of iOS 12 is Siri Shortcuts. Now there's a simple way to add a Siri Shortcut and there's a more complex way where where you can do a lot more with it. Let's look at the simple way today.

So when you go into Settings you can go to Siri & Search. Here is where you see at the top it says My Shortcuts. It's got a number next to it showing the number you've got. It also has Suggested Shortcuts. So this is one of the easiest ways to add things. You'll see some actions you've repeated over time. Maybe calling the same phone number  or sending a text message. Usually it's pretty recent stuff. You can select one of those and create a Siri Shortcut for it. It can be that easy.

For instance, I have this text message here. Let's say it's a text message you have to send all the time. Hit the plus button there and I can assign a voice command to it. Check in with Bill. So you can see here it confirms that if I say Check in with Bill it will send Just Checking In, as a message, to the contact Bill Smith here. I could hit Re-Record Phrase there or I can just hit Done. Now that I've got that done you can see it goes right into that list there. That's the list that you get to if you tap My Shortcuts. So I had one from before and I've got this Check in with Bill.

So now I could actually activate Siri and say Check in with Bill and it will do that action. So let's just go to the Home screen here and let's try it. Check in with Bill. Ready to send with Messages. Yes. Okay. Sent using Messages. So there you go. I've sent that and I've created this shortcut here.

It's easy to get rid of these. Go into My Shortcuts. I could swipe and there's Delete there. I could delete it. Also, if I look here and I see it has, you know, those two suggestions here. It also has All Shortcuts. These are a whole bunch of suggestions. So maybe there's something else that's not appearing there. But I can go through this list here and see maybe some more. I can even Search there. So it's going to search for recent actions that I've taken. So it should be that easy to add those.

Also, here on this screen you can tap on any one of these and you can see you can Re-record the Phrase there too. So if you wanted to modify what the phrase was to trigger that action you could do it. Now you can do a lot more complex things by creating your own Siri Shortcuts in the Shortcuts app. We'll look at that at another time.