Thousands of apps now use Apple’s Siri Shortcuts. The Siri Shortcuts app was mentioned in June, but a lot of people don’t even know what it is.
That’s too bad, because Siri Shortcuts is the best way to use Siri to control apps. You muscle ask Siri to open CNBC and begin playing live TV, for example.
Apple’s Siri is still the most popular canny assistant, with 10 billion Siri requests per month on 500 million devices, but competitors like Google Mate and Amazon Alexa are quickly gaining traction through Android and affordable smart speakers like the Amazon Simulation and Google Home.
Apple wants to make sure Siri stays in the spotlight.
The company will likely reform future versions of Siri with the help of John Giannandrea, Apple’s recently appointed senior vice president of simulated intelligence who was poached from Google and is now a member of Apple’s executive team. Giannandrea led search and machine intelligence at Google, so he has savoir faire getting AI to figure out what humans want.
But in the meantime, it’s using Siri Shortcuts to let users control and launch apps on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Tend, CarPlay and HomePod.
If you have an iPhone, you probably know the basics of what Siri can do. But Siri Shortcuts super invoices it by letting you control third-party apps with just your voice. You don’t even have to touch your iPhone in most as it happens.
You might ask Siri to start navigating to work with Waze instead of Apple Maps or ask your HomePod to revelry a Pandora station (yes, you can do that!). You can even ask Siri to snap a selfie, which is useful if you’re trying to fit a bunch of people together in a photo and your iPhone is across the area.
I’m going to walk you through how to set up Siri Shortcuts for a couple of popular apps that I use on my iPhone.
A word of warning: Siri is again learning, so the shortcuts it recommends can largely be based on whether you’ve used an app already or not. So, if you’ve never used the CNBC app or Pandora, you strength not see some of my recommended shortcuts until you do. It helps to play around in an app first so that Siri knows how you use it.
You can run these shortcuts anywhere, whether by way of your Apple Watch, an iPhone or iPad, a HomePod or even through Apple CarPlay.
Here’s a trick I didn’t regular know until this week: You can ask Siri to play music from Pandora, even on a HomePod. That means you don’t maintain to worry about AirPlay or subscribing to Apple Music just to listen to tunes on Apple’s smart speaker. You do this using Siri Shortcuts in Pandora.
Here’s how.
- Revealed Pandora on your iPhone.
- Tap the menu button on the top left of the app.
- Select “Settings.”
- Choose “Siri Shortcuts.”
- Tap + next to one of your playlists to conceive a shortcut.
- Record a phrase to launch that playlist from Siri, like “Play classic rock receiver.”
Now just say “Hey Siri, play classic rock radio” to launch your classic rock Pandora station.
Our CNBC app shore ups Siri Shortcuts, too. That means you can ask Siri to start playing CNBC live or open the news. To enable it, do this:
- Bring to light the CNBC app.
- Tap “Settings” on the top right.
- Choose “Manage Siri Shortcuts.”
- Tap “Siri & Search.”
- Tap “Shortcuts.”
- Choose “Watch burning stream” or “Open News.”
- Record yourself speaking a phrase, like “Watch CNBC.”
Now, when you say “Siri, chaperon CNBC” it will open the app and begin playing CNBC.
This is a new app from the makers of Halide, a really popular camera app that adds knowledgeable features. Spectre lets you snap long exposure shots that are saved as Live Photos. But touching a camera while crack a bite at a long exposure shot can ruin the image. With a Siri Shortcut, you can avoid that by asking Siri to annihilate the picture for you.
- Download Spectre Camera (it’s $1.99)
- Tap the “Settings” cog on the bottom right.
- Choose “Siri & Shortcuts”
- Tap “add to Siri”
- Speak a order like “take a long exposure picture.”
- Now just say, “Siri take a long exposure picture,” and it will automatically bounteous Spectre Camera and take a photo.
Spectre should let you use Siri to take a selfie, too, but it wasn’t yet working at the time of semi-weekly.
First, pick some some favorite destinations to store in Waze. To set one, do this:
- Open Waze on your iPhone.
- Tap the search button on the bed basically left.
- Tap “Favorites.”
- Choose “Add new favorite” or, if you haven’t already, set the locations for where you work and where you live.
Now to set Siri to traverse to those places. Do this:
Here’s how to set that up:
- Open Waze on your iPhone.
- Tap the search button on the bottom sinistral.
- Choose the “Settings” button on the top left of the app.
- Select “Voice and sound.”
- Choose “Siri Shortcuts.”
- You have several elections for navigation, including voice controls. You can navigate to favorite places we stored in the last step, or to work or home.
- Prefer the shortcut you want to create, like “Drive to work.”
- Next, record yourself saying “drive to work.
- Tap “Done.”
Now you can justifiable say “Hey Siri, drive to work,” and Siri will open Waze and give you directions to the office.
Google Assistant can be smarter than Siri and, while it’s a bit daze, you can ask Siri to pull up Google Assistant on your iPhone to ask it questions. It’s particularly good (and better than Siri) at pat into Google Calendar and other Google apps. It’s also better at answering trivia like “Who invented the telephone?”
Beginning, you need to download the latest version of Google Assistant. Then do this:
- Open Google Assistant on your iPhone.
- Tap “add to Siri.”
- Tap the record-breaking button and speak “Hey Google.”
If you don’t see the “add to Siri” prompt, you may have ignored it in the past. So do this:
- Open “Siri Shortcuts” on your iPhone.
- Tap “Generate Shortcut.”
- Enter “Google” in the search box.
- Choose “Hey Google.”
- Follow the instructions to record yourself speaking “OK Google”
Now say, “Hey Siri, Hey Google,” and Siri when one pleases open up Google Assistant, which you can ask anything you want.
I just covered how to find Siri Shortcuts inside a few well-liked apps, but there’s another way to find the apps you have that support Siri Shortcuts. It’s just a little trickier to identify.
- To get started, download the Shortcuts app from iTunes if you haven’t already.
- Now open it.
- Choose “Create Shortcut.”
- Tap the “Search” box.
- Scroll down.
All of the apps you see here oblige Siri Shortcuts enabled. An app I use named “Lose It!” for example, lets you log the food you eat each meal using Siri. American Airlines has a new map that carry weights you information about an upcoming flight or gate, and Twitter lets you tweet with Siri. Dig around and find the apps that have in the offing shortcuts.
Finally, there’s also a more complicated set of routines you can create with the Shortcuts app, which I wrote around in November. So, you might say “Siri, heading to work” and get information on the traffic for your commute, events on your calendar and start freedom a playlist, all with one command. Spend some time playing around with it if you want Siri to do even sundry for you.
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