Apple today announced that American Airlines, Dexcom, Caviar, Merriam Webster, and Spectre have added Siri Shortcuts support to their apps this week. Airbnb, Drop, ReSound, and Smarter also plan to add Siri Shortcuts integration to their apps over the next few months.
Apple provided us with a summary of how Siri Shortcuts works in each app:
- American Airlines: Get updates on all your flight details ("Hey Siri, flight update"). This includes flight status, drive time, a map of the airport with gate location, walking time to gate, boarding time, and more.
- Caviar: Set up a shortcut to re-order food and check order status. ("Hey Siri, order my usual pizza" or "Hey Siri, Caviar order status").
- Dexcom: Lets diabetics better track and manage glucose levels through their app ("Hey Siri, what's my blood glucose?").
- Merriam Webster Dictionary: Ask for the word of the day ("Hey Siri, what's the word of the day?")
- Spectre: You can use shortcuts to take long exposure photos hands-free ("Hey Siri, long exposure") so the phone doesn't move while shooting.
Coming in March-April:
- Airbnb: Get details on your stay, including check in and check out times, address and map, and Wi-Fi password ("Hey Siri, my Airbnb stay").
- Drop for Bosch: Make your morning coffee before you get out of bed ("Hey Siri, make an espresso").
- ReSound: Change the setting of your hearing aid based on surroundings ("Hey Siri, restaurant mode").
- strong>Smarter: Make a pot of coffee using the Smarter Coffee Machine ("Hey Siri, make a small pot of coffee").
Apple says thousands of apps now support Siri Shortcuts, which debuted as a key feature of iOS 12 last year.
Apple's examples include Waze, Nike Run Club, Snoww, HomeCourt, AutoSleep, QardioArm, DSLR Camera, Pandora, Tile, Overcast, Evernote, Trello, Omnifocus, Things, Fantastical, Citymapper, Kayak, Hotels.com, British Airways, Lufthansa, Booking.com, VRBO, CARROT, The Weather Channel, Dark Sky, and many others.
Siri Shortcuts let you create voice and tap-activated automations that can complete multiple complex tasks in just a few seconds. The feature is available in the Settings app under Siri & Search and through the dedicated Shortcuts app.
Update: Apple has since highlighted several of these Siri Shortcuts apps in a press release.
Top Rated Comments
Siri, like all of them, is still in the infant stage with a lot of room for improvement, but I use Siri everyday to set alarms, reminders, make phone calls, check and send messages, check my calendar, check on weather, sport scores, traffic, control my Homekit lights, and of course listen to great sounding music and podcasts. She is spot on the vast majority of times for these simple tasks (in the not too distant past, this would have been considered science fiction:)) but again, I look forward to seeing the fruits of investments like VocalIQ where Siri can decode more natural language and sequential conversations, etc.
What does siri not do that I need it to? What do other assistants do that I need? I have several alexa and google home devices at home so I can test.