Hello everyone. Thanks for tuning in again. I want to take you through today
just what Shortcuts is and how you can apply it to your life, so stay tuned. So
iOS shortcuts are intended to automate little tasks that you do with your
iPhone or your other iOS devices like an iPad, and it's also intended to automate
a little bit of your life. So this, when comparing to either Amazon Alexa or the
Google Assistant this has a little bit more of a focus on your life, and your
time with your phone here. So the applets are centered a little more around the
native functions that show up on an iPhone. What's also really important to
talk about here is the fact that Siri is here to give you suggestions for
shortcuts, and then on top of that to execute some of those shortcuts for you.
So you're not actually having to tap on different items to execute those.
Let's walk through some of the basic functions here with Shortcuts on my
iPhone. First off I'm going to scroll over to what's basically the widgets screen
now, and I'm all the way at the top and I just pulled down. Now what you'll notice
is Siri has suggestions, and we've had these before showing the applets or the
sorry the applications rather that I use quite often, but you're also noticing
down below sending a message to Mark. Now Mark is someone that I send messages to
at this time on these days in this location quite often, so Siri is now
suggesting that as a Shortcut for me. So if I tap on that, it takes me straight to
the messages screen, and it doesn't fill in any message, but I could add that
later in the shortcuts, I'll kind of show you that as we go through things on the
channel, but right now I'm over in the messages application, I have Mark pulled
up and we're ready to send him a message. So you can see how that shortened my
time line, and it also kind of triggered me
about doing this. So switching over now I want to show you the actual Shortcuts
application. You can see it there in my menu, it used to be Workflow, like I said
earlier, but it is now called Shortcuts. Now within here there are a number of
things that I had already previously created, this would be empty for you, and
top right you go ahead and you click that plus and you get started creating a
shortcut. Now on top of that Apple has given us a number of suggestions to
start using this application, you can see that there are shortcuts for sharing, they
have what they're calling wonderful running shortcuts, and other apps which
I'll show you in a minute, and shortcuts for music. There's also all kinds of
other shortcuts down here that they've pre-created for you. What I'll say again
is it functions around a lot of the native applications that are here in
your iPhone or iPad. So something that I think we're going to see more and more
of is the health-related stuff, so I'm going to go ahead and create a
health-related shortcut. We're not going to go really deep into the functionality
here but let's go ahead so you can see the log water routine or shortcut here.
I'm going to tap on it and what you get up right away is it says it works with
the following apps and services, so it gives you a list of what it's working
with, and you can see it's just the health app here, and if you want you can
show the actions before you kind of get into this. So you can see that this is a
list with I think that's ounces and it's going to ask you how many fluid ounces,
and then it's going to log it, so you can see how its kind of flowing, you're going
to choose a number, it's going to ask you that question as you choose that number,
and then you're going to log that in your phone. If you wanted you could
change things like the value, so the fluid ounces in US,. that's not
something I would normally use here in Canada. So let's go ahead and tap get
shortcut and it's added to my library. So it's already there, I just tap over and I
can go ahead and tap log water, so you can see how many fluid ounce
of water did you drink, I can go ahead and just tap 16. So for the first time
I'm running this application you can see that I have to allow some permissions,
I've gone ahead and selected those, I hit allow, and now it's logged that water in
my health application. You can see you could log meals, you could log water, you
could log exercise, you can do all of those things in a relatively automated
fashion. So now from here this looks like, okay I've got to go into the shortcuts
application all the time? No you don't, there are a number of ways, remember Siri
is going to suggest this to you, you can also talk to Siri which I'll show you in
a bit, but you can also tap on the three dots here. It gives you the editing
screen, if you wanted you could edit what it's asking you for, the different
options that you have to choose from, the value in fluid ounces, you can see I can
switch to milliliters for myself, and you can do a number of things here. If you
wanted to set a different date you could go ahead and do that, I don't know why
you would, but what I really want to talk about is the couple of icons at the top
of the screen here. This is essentially your share icon, and you can see that I
can actually tap on the plus where it says add to homescreen, I could also
share it online, lots of people are doing that right now, so you can
find resources for that, you can also obviously create this or duplicate the
shortcut, and create a slightly different version. So if you wanted one for logging
water and you wanted one for logging something else, you could go ahead and do
that. Now you can see that it's just telling you the things that you have to
do here, you just tap again the share button, roll over a little bit, add it to
the home screen, and then you're just going to tap add now.
That's an icon now on my iPhone, and anytime I tap on that, I'm running the
little shortcut here, and you can see that I can do it again, it's run it, I'm
done, and I can leave the application. So that's all that has to happen for
executing one of these shortcuts. Right now there's another component to
this and of course I think this is what
everyone's going to care about, is how do you control it with Siri? Now inside of
my log water shortcut that I just created with you, up in the top right,
there's the to switch icon, and when you tap on that, you're going to see the add
to Siri button. Now adding to Siri allows you to say whatever you want, you can
kind of set any phrase that you want to get Siri to trigger this applet, or this
shortcut, so I can say something like log water, and now any time I say that to
Siri, she's going to use this shortcut, and start it. So I've hit done the Siri
phrase is log water you can see that I can show it in the widget. You can see
also that I can show it in the share sheet, so that's the icon
whenever you're in another application and you tap the share button it will
show up here to go ahead and log water as a shortcut from anything. So this
would obviously be more powerful if you were using social media or something to
go ahead and share items, that's not really going to be a big deal for
logging water, but now that we've done that, and I hit done a couple of times. I
have my log water shortcut all set up now, I can go ahead and ask Siri to do
the same. So let's do that.
Log water. So you can see right away it brought up the whole shortcut, I can go
ahead and tap twelve ounces in this case, and it's now logged that water, there's
nothing else I need to do. So you can see the functionality is really powerful
actually for running routines or running little things that you do all the time.
I've added it to Siri, there is a little bit of setup work here, but this gives
you a pretty good baseline for what iOS Shortcuts is, and how to use it a little
bit on your iPhone and iPad device. So thanks for watching everyone we'll see
you next time.
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