The Shortcuts app is Apple’s hub for all kinds of automation on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This allows you to create automated routines based on simple triggers, such as turning on your lights when you approach home at the end of your workday. The Shortcuts app is very powerful, but creating shortcuts has always been a little difficult. Without technical knowledge, it’s not easy to learn how triggers work, why certain steps prevent automation, etc. Apple is changing all that with iOS 27, scheduled for release this fall.
Apple will soon let you use its AI feature, Apple Intelligence, to create shortcuts that include simple text prompts. This means you can ask Apple Intelligence to create a shortcut with a simple prompt like, “When you clock out, message your partner your estimated time of arrival.” This creates a shortcut that you can ask the app to run every day of the week. This makes shortcuts much more accessible, even for those who feel intimidated by creating multi-step automated workflows. You may need to verify that shortcuts work correctly, adjust prompts to fix errors, and iterate several times before you have full automation. However, this is much easier than manually creating your own shortcuts.
What do you think so far?
To be honest, even I don’t feel comfortable creating lots of shortcuts and automations because it takes time. I’d rather search the internet for great shortcuts created by the community, but I’m looking forward to creating even more of my own with the upcoming Apple Intelligence integration. The problem is that this feature only works on devices that support Apple Intelligence. This means you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer to take advantage of this feature. People with older devices won’t be able to use new Apple Intelligence features.
