Using Siri Shortcut Suggestions

The simplest way to take advantage of the new Siri Shortcuts feature in iOS 12 is to just use one of the suggestions in the Settings app. You can look through a list of recent activity and quickly create a shortcut from that, assigning a Siri trigger phrase to use the shortcut over and over again.

Video Transcript: 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.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Using Siri Shortcut Suggestions”

5 years ago

How i make a siri-shortcut for camera. For example: "Take a photograph"? So i will not use a cable release or remote control. Voice-ordered-shooting ;-)

Gary Rosenzweig

AP: You can do that using the Shortcuts app, yes. There is an Action for "Take Photo." But I don't know how useful it will be in the way that you are thinking because you still have to speak "Hey Siri, Take a Photo" (or whatever command you set). If you want to take a photo at an exact moment it is better to just use the Earbud headphone volume control or a remote.

Stanley Greenberg

How is the Siri Shortcut better than just saying "Hey, Siri, Check in with Bill Smith" or whatever?

Stanley: Depends on the shortcut. If it already was something that you could do with a simple command, then the only difference is you can change the words that trigger it. But in this case what does the example you used mean? What would Siri do? It wouldn't know to text that phrase.

Comments Closed.

Using Siri Shortcut Suggestions

Comments: 4 Responses to “Using Siri Shortcut Suggestions”

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