Apple Voice Assistant Siri to Become Smarter Than Ever With Shortcuts

• Apple announced Shortcuts for Siri which will allow the voice assistant to go through multi-step routines.
• Users will be able to record and assign phrases to enable the voice assistant to perform a series of actions.
• The new feature also works with Siri’s Suggestions feature and can offer multiple suggestions.

Siri is receiving a host of new updates including a new Shortcuts features to allow the voice assistant to perform multiple actions in sequence. Users can assign specific phrases to make the voice assistant perform actions whenever the voice commands are repeated.

Image Courtesy of Apple WWDC 2018

The feature also tightly integrates with the Suggestions feature to pre-emptively make multiple suggestions when triggered. Apple has hundreds of available Shortcuts in the app which users can use to modify or use for their own needs. Voice recognition is something the voice assistant is not fully adept at, with competitors Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa fully capable of understanding nuances of language.

Some of the other new skills Siri is getting access to includes language translation and notification management for upcoming flights. With recent incidents of the voice assistant offering wrong answers, Apple seeks to address such issues in the upcoming update. The new updates will be available as part of iOS 12 at launch in fall 2018.