Shortcuts Corner Automation and AI

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Terms apply. Learn more at go. Graphite Mornings have a rhythm . You can hear it , feel it . And at Quaker, we fuel it with one hundred percent whole grain odes and a good source of fiber in every bowl , helping you turn that rhythm into your soundtrack for a great day The fuel to start whatever's next . Quaker, official sponsor of FIVA World Cup twenty six . Oh coming up on IOS today , Rosemary Orchard and I Mike a Sargent talk about the other things Apple announced at W W DC. Stay tuned podcasts you love from people you trust . This is to it . This is IOS Today, episode eight hundred seven with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent, recorded Tuesday une, j sixteenth, twenty twenty six for Thursday, june eighteenth, twenty twenty six . What's new in Watch OS, TBOS, iPad OS . Hello and welcome to IOS today. The show where we talk all things IOSOS, iPad Watch OS Home Pods and all the other platforms that Apple has to offer us. We love to tell you about them and help you make the most of your devices. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah, Sergeant . And my name is Ross Richard, and I'm here to help you folks keep watch over what's coming soon, including in Carclay, maybe. We'll see how far we get today. Yes, so as I mentioned, WWDC has come and gone at this point . But that means that we have had the opportunity to start to pull apart the updates, figure out what's new, figure out what's changed, and really kind of dig in. And even before we get into what's happening in Watch OS , et cetera, I wanted to ask Rosemary , you in you are in the UK , but you're not in the EU , does that mean that as a beta user you would have access to Siri or Siri AI ? And if so, did you join the waitlist? And if so, have you gotten in yet to New Siri? Well, so I am not in the ear , as you rightfully point out, I'm not at all better about that part , but it does mean that I am able to join the waitlist for a new series, which I actually did during our last episode just to show folks how it works. Sadly, as Fox may be able to see on screen, you can just see it says joint waiting list that's it. It's capitalised . It's very exciting, but I am still waiting. I don't know anybody personally who has gotten to that though I have just seen Scooter X . Oh Scooter X No, I can't upgrade to the MacOS Golden Gate Beta because if I do that then, I'm going to be murdered by the lovely Fox Twit for ruining podcasting for the rest of the summer . I'll see what I can do. But apparently there is a way to bypass that waitlist . But I'm testing the other AI features like AI creation of shortcuts, which, oh my gosh, saved me so much time yesterday. Genuinely, it saved me about forty five minutes, a combination of using AI and an AI created shortc absolutely saved my makeup. So yeah, I'll get there, but I'm not there yet. Have you had a chance to try it, Micah? So just for people who might need the context, there is a piece going around for Mac Rumors and I think elsewhere that talks about how there is a terminal command essentially that you can use to access the new series I came close to wanting to do that, but then I thought , no, I do that and then it's going to mess something up and I'll you know I just I was too worried that it would end up messing something up somewhere and then it would result in me having to wait longer to be able to check out new series. So I refrained from doing this this terminal command that you do to get access to it . The next day after reading that I woke up and I had a notification saying, Hey, you're in. And so I do have access to New Siri. I have been using New Siri, and I have to say that I had talked before about how, you know, I don't know , I don't trust Siri anymore really. I used to try to use it and it just always would let me down. I've been doing little tests with it. I've been going normally, I would go through this process myself. I would, you know , if I'm changing multiple alarms at once or I am trying to little things that normally I would do. I instead have tasked Siri with doing them and it actually worked . And so we'll continue to see how that plays out, but I was I am in early stages pretty happy with with what we've got here with with New Siri. But this is about so much more than that because along with the introduction of IOS twenty seven, we saw the introduction of Watch OS twenty seven . And while it may seem on the face of it like Apple's announcements have all been about its AI, Apple intelligence and the new series. Oh, there've been other changes as well . According to Macrumors , there have been some improvements to workout buddy as well as indoor run tracking . And so workout buddy is something that Apple introduced in the last version of IOS and gave you a sort of AI coach on getting, you know, on speeding up on , you know, doing a better job of reaching your next zone . And now it uses even more data to be able to kind of give you progress updates to, give you suggestions for workouts , to also give you the ability to work without an iPhone nearby. And I think that's a big change that people who are primarily Apple Watch users will be happy about, but also people who don't want to have to bring their phone along whenever they're doing a run , which is very exciting . Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a cream y mocha rappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel maybe? Or a white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks rappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Yes. There are also two brand apps coming to Watch OS twenty seven , which number one is the Siri app , which is an app for interacting with Siri instead of just triggering it through your voice or through press and holding the digital crown. I do this so automatically now yes it's digital crown that I had to double check and then the other new app coming which I need this app because I so the most used feature on my Apple Watch, I'm not gonna lie is flying my phone . Digging my phone to find out where I put it down or under which part of the dog it is or under which part of a five year old it ended up or in what pile blankets it is pressing and holding on that to make it flash at times or just pressing it and listening for the ding and having it tell me approximately how far away it is is, that definitely a really important feature, but it would be really nice to be able to like find my keys with my watch as well, which goes back to what you were saying, Michael about making the watch a more independent device . So yeah, find bite is coming to Watch OS twenty seven. Yes, watch OS twenty seven. So it's WWDC twenty six announcing the OS features for twenty seven. This is very confusing and I really wish that these numbers could be slightly more align ed. But either way, we're getting two new apps, which is very exciting. I'm not entirely certain why you would want to open the Siri app. This is something that I've not figured out for any platforms. So if you have feed back about why you would love to open the Siri app to be able to talk to Seri, then please write in and let us know what way it's going to improve your life because my brain is struggling to understand the need for this, but I am very sure that there is one. So it would be lovely to see feedback from people who are actually looking forward to this. Yes . As nine to five Mac points out, with the updates to Watch YoS twenty seven and the sort of acknowledgement in IOS twenty seven that liquid glass can be a little bit difficult to read to process to understand , one would think that you would have that feature, that option, rather, to adjust liquid glass in Watch OS twenty seven. That is not the case. It is not part of the update And so when or rather the setup process, whereas on IOS twenty seven, it is one of the new interstitials that pops up to say, hey, how would you like to change IOS ? IOS is liquid glass to make it more or less transluc . So it's a little bit different with Watch OS. There's not a slider there, but there have been some changes. The new grid that sort of bases everything around the new series is a little odd and takes some getting used to . But overall , the updates that have been made on Watch OS I think are kind of secondary. You don't quite pick up on what has changed until you A look at the comparisons, but B kind of notice subtle changes to sleep tracking becoming more accurate and those different fitness activities, the algorithms have been updated to make things a little bit more precise . So a little buried, but it's there. You can find it. It's true . Now , aside from Watch OS , there are some changes elsewhere , including with iCloud plus. For people who aren't familiar, iCloud Plus includes Apple's offerings for kind of improved storage space , some privacy features like being able to set up your own custom email domains and with the iCloud plus subscription , these are some of the changes . This is from Apple's press release. Some Apple intelligence features, including image generation, have daily usage limits because they rely on powerful server models. Increased access is available with most iCloud plus subscription plans, which also include Apple intelligence support for compatible home cameras. So the point here is that at times you may do something on your phone using the new AI features . They may require server side processing and throughout the day you do it a few times f,ine. But if you are regularly hitting Apple's servers , then there's a possibility that you'll run up against the daily usage limits. Being an iCloud plus subscriber then will give you the ability to take that further and have more available to you. So that's one change. And then on the home side of things , there are new features that are better at kind of understanding what's in a video and can give you some notific ations based on that. So knowing, oh , somebody's at the door and this is what they're doing . Just a little bit more information than you already get as part of your notifications. So that's the iCloud plus change . I believe Rosemary that there are also some new carplay features. What's going on there? Yeah , so one Carplay feature that actually snuck in twenty six point four . So that is the latest version of the publicly available operating system is the ability for Apple C orporate to communicate back to your car what route it's on and like the navigation setup that you selected , which is very interesting because that is a tie for self driving cars and potenti ally getting carplay in Teslas . So we'll have to see what happens there because the biggest problem with carplay and all of these things is very dependent on car manufacturers to support these things as well . However, we are getting the ability to watch videos in Corplay . Not while the car is in motion. Be clear, that is that is not happening . We are only getting the ability to watch cars in carplay when the car is stopped , which, you know, that's pretty cool as an entertainment device while you're potentially waiting to do a pickup or drop off or like that . You can now do audio scrubbing in the now playing interface , which I cannot tell you how many times I've like pulled up to traffic lights and gone, what was said in that p odcast like three minutes ago? And trying to rewind like three minutes in a podcast is so difficult if you don't have the right like rewind settings . So just being able to like pop your finger on there while the car is stopped and dragged back or have a passenger do that. That's pretty amazing . There is also improved GPS accuracy and navigation heading. I've yet to see what this looks like myself . I'm looking forward to seeing it, but I was looking for it the other day when I was driving and couldn't see it, but I was also driving so I was trying to focus on, you know, driving my car . There is improved wireless car play reliability so far this has resulted in me having to reboot my wireless Carplay connector to get music every single time I've got in the car. So I've filed some feedback about that and I'm looking forward to that being fixed and actually having better wireless reliability . But then there's also a mini player for audio within apps , which yeah, this is something that's a bit more developer basically it just means that yeah playing audio is going to be a little more consistent across apps, you know, third party apps as well as Apple Music and things like that. So yeah, new things are coming. And of course Siri AI is coming to CarPlay as well. So you can have a chat with Siri AI as you drive along if you would like to. Yay I think this is a cool feature especially like you said the audio scrubbing I'm looking forward to because that is something that I've sort of even put my finger on the screen before it, wait, oh, that's right. I can't do that . So that's good. And then I actually, it's funny, one of the on my clockwise podcast, one of the things that I had said that I wanted Apple talked about a lot of updates that were just fixes and improvements. And one of the things I said was, I don't know if this will end up being the case, but I really, really, really want improvements to wireless carplay. And then shortly after that I saw this Smack Rumors article that specifically points to improved wireless car flay reliability. And I said, That is what I've been waiting for. So I was very excited about that coming through for sure. Now that is CarPlay that's watch OS . Of course, iPad OS is the other big change here. Now if you watched our last episode where we talked about the changes that have come to IOS twenty seven , then a lot of the expectations that you will have for IOS twenty seven are also there for iPad OS twenty seven . There aren't a lot of unique features for iPad OS that set it apart what we have in IOS . And I think that that's becoming more common, right? We've got two different platforms that run similar software and one would argue part of the reason that there is this convergence that soon and very soon we may see an iPhone that folds. And when you have an iPhone that folds , well, then you need something that can move between iPhone and iPad size . And another change that I saw that on MacOS the iPhone mirroring has been updated to account for larger screens that are not just iPhone screen size. So really interesting stuff . But ultimately, what you can expect with iPad OS is the updated Siri . Especially with many an iPad, you've got some pretty good hardware there, some pretty good processing power. So being able to make use of use of Siri AI on your modern device is going to I think make all the difference. Having that personal context , being able to use having your devices indexed is great and knowing sort of what having your Siri AI know what's going on across all of your your OS . So let's see. I'm trying to see if there's anything specific. I mean as we've kind of looked through this, it really is a kind of copy paste between the two. The child safety improvements, the Apple intelligence , being able to generate shortcuts, and of course the improvements that have come on making things run a lot faster . Specific to iPad , browsing and transferring files from iPad to an external hard drive up to five times faster. Of course, air drop transfers are faster and some of these changes just include kind of better transitions between different parts of the of the operating system . I did like one change that has come in iPad OS that makes it feel a little bit more Mac OS, it's silly, but in the status bar at the top kind of like the menu bar on the Mac , you have the name of the app. And I know that that's not really important, but it's just nice. It makes me think of MacOS and I love it. Honestly, it's it's genuinely a feature that I have not realized before I've needed. So the number of times I'm doing something on my iPad and someone will say to me so what app is that? And my brain just immediately goes blank, click, I know I'm using notability or draft so whatever it is that I'm currently using . But as soon as you ask me the name of the app, can I remember what that is? No . So it's really nice to just have that there as a prompt like, you know, just reminding me yeah, this is notability, this is drafts, this is free form, whatever it is I'm using so that then, you know, people can go okay, that's cool and then write it down because I can see how it's spelt instead of trying to guess which is quite important for some academics Al right anything else that we should m ention here , of course there have been updates. I think we even talked a little bit about it last time with Vision OS, but it's not a platform that we tend to cover too much on the show. And of course MacOS, another platform that we don't tend to cover on the show. Again, this year has really been about sort of platform parity in a lot of ways and making sure that you can use the features across the board and they work how you expect them to in all of those places . Yes . Yeah. It is worth mentioning that TVOS is getting a couple of updates . So foster airplay connections, you'll be able to see Apple Care coverage in your TBOS settings . And there's larger text size accessibility options, which is really nice. One feature I am loving is it's actually an iOS feature , but when something is playing on Apple TV and your iPhone is physically near it, it shows it on the screen sort of as a halfway house between a live activity and a notification so that you can control it with the remote on your phone immediately, which is amazing . And there's smart downloads now on Apple TV, so you can download things on Apple TV. If you didn't know before, you can download things on Apple TV so you can take it with you when you travel, which is pretty awesome . But there's smart or smarter downloads and then the redesigned podcast up . And this one's pretty awesome because podcasts is going to support video again whichich yeah, for a while it didn't for some reason but yeah the redesign podcast app sounds pretty amazing . I have yet to update either of my Apple TV's to the test operating system because there are not other people in my life that also use them so I wanted to let other people have a go first and just see how stable or unstable it was before just dragging everything on to OS twenty seven but, I'm hearing good things. So I think I will be updating my TBOS soon so I can give everybody firsthand feedback of how that goes. All right, I do believe oh actually before I before I say what I hear, I want to mention that if there are any features that have stuck out to you that we have not hit that you'd like for us to talk about, please do let us know. You can email us iOS today at Twitter TV. But moving right along, I can hear the music . It's time for Shortcuts Corner This is Shortcuts Corner, the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts requests, and Rosemary Orchard Our Shortcuts expert provides a response. Although this week, the person writing in at the request is not a person, but a company. And it is a company that has come out with lots of new features and Rosemary is going to tell us about them. Rosemary, taken away. Yes, yeah. So there is a lot going on with shortcuts right now. I already mentioned some of the new features last week and demoed creating shortcuts with AI because honestly that is a game changer and I still am very much up for as somebody if you have a request for IOS today and you want to send an instructors corner, but you want to try it with AI as well, absolutely do both and send me the link to the creative one as well because I would love to do a compare and contrast after I create your shortcut for you. I think that that would be a really great feature for us . But one of the biggest things now in shortcuts is, you know, I mentioned this last week. When you open it, it wants to create a shortcut for you. But you can tap on the three blocks button in the top right to go into the actions , but you can't create an automated shortcut through a particular tab anymore. Instead you select the automation actions inside of shortcuts, which then reveals all of the triggers that you can use. So you can have time of day alarms, sleep, arriving and leaving places, messaging, emails , airplane mode, etc . You can have now when a particular or when a keyboard is connected, which is pretty awesome . When you tap a wallet card or pass, these ones aren't new and then there is a brand new one right here, notifications . So when you get a notification, say maybe from Outlook, which you could use for work , then it can you know do a particular thing like maybe flash light on your phone because you want to be notified about work things. Personally I wouldn't do that. I would invert it and flash for the things that are important outside of work for me . But that's how up to you to choose your work life balance. But this is a really cool feature. So you can say, hey, when I get a notification , you have to select a particular app. So I'll save one password for example. And when I had nothing selected, people might have called that there. I'll just clear that. It says automation is invalid . And this is something that is a really cool feature. Big fan of that because it's there going, hey, you know, like I can't do this automation right now. This is not going to work . So you can expand this to say run immediately and whether or not to notify when run, defaults running immediately. And there are filters where you can specify that the title or subtitle or message of the notification contains something in particular. So if you want to change all the lights green in your house when your resorter is on the way or when your team scores a particular goal or a particular team in whatever sport it is you follow scores a goal, then you can do that now, which is amazing. And I'm a really big fan of this . You know, it's something that people have been asking for for a long time . So I'm very glad it's here . Just if you are getting very excited about this and you plan to create one hundred and one automations to do that , there is something known as Too Much of a good thing . So make sure that you create them slowly and consider in full what might happen. Like for example changing the color of the lights in your house every time your team scores a goal if, you ever have to go to bed early or your team ever plays in another time zone , you may want to consider that. Just factor that sort of thing in. Just in case I'm just giving you a little warning now that you might want to think about that because I've been on the wrong end of automations I've created for myself more than once in my life. Previously, if you wanted to save data across multiple runs of a shortcut, so you wanted to run a shortcut at nine o'clock in the morning, and then you wanted to run it again at five o'clock, the shortcut you run at nine o'clock in the morning has a set of data and then it throws it away and that data no longer exists. And then if you want that data again when you run a shortcut at five o'clock in the afternoon there's no way to do that unless you do things like save it to a file or use a third party application like Data Jar or something like that. All of which are really great options . So now there is the fantastic feature of store . So storing allow you to save a variable but for longer. So you can store content and then if you tap the expansionr ower and this is very important, you can make this global . So three or five or ten shortcuts can access this or the same shortcut can access it again and again and again and that can be incredibly useful to just save information and make it available to you to use. So for example, your next work trip that you can put the date of that in there and then everything can reference it instead of recalculating it time and time again because I mean that's kind of inefficient. So there's also a new feature for figuring out what's on screen or it's not a new feature , it's improved and you basically get a little more context with this. So you can get your onscreen images, calendar events, contacts, you know, messages, mail, etc . There's even vo ice memoes and webpages. And this is just a big improvement because previously you could figure out what app was open and what app was there when you run something or triggered a shortcut somehow . And you could kind of get what was on screen , but it didn't work a lot of the time. And the reason why it didn't work was because apps didn't have a standardized way to present that data. It was kind of just going, you're an old webpage. Can't really do anything with you most of the time, and now it can . So that's really cool. And speaking of messages because messages you can get the context of messages on screen, Messages has a brand new action. In fact, it has two delete conversations and delete messages. So if you want to automate sending something and then deleting it, you can do that . Not perhaps the most useful, but yeah, it could be you, could maybe work on try to find all the messages that say stop in them because you're trying to unsubscribe for a bunch of spam and then deleting them . So you know, that's pretty useful . There is There is also a whole bunch of new things. So models, if you're working with AI and you're asking AI to do something, you can now use a Cloud Pro model . And yeah, this is something that actually could have come in useful. It turned out I didn't need it, but I am just gonna show folks this is a shortcut that I created. So I'm going to a conference later this week. So by the time this episode is out, I'll already be at the conference , but it's called Larvale Live and it's in London. And so I wanted it to grab the conference schedule off the website and add it to my calendar for me because the last thing I want to be doing is trying to scroll through a web page five, ten, fifteen times a day to figure out what talk is coming up next. So I got it to do that and yeah, the Cloud model did it perfectly for me. So I could have tried I did try on device , my iPhone got a little warm and then nothing happened for a while so I sort of gave up on that. So I tried Cloud and that actually worked perfectly and next time I may try Cloud Pro because I have a feeling that there are actually little gaps in between the talks and it hasn't done that. It's extrapolated that the end of a talk is the start time of the next talk, which is a reasonable logical approach that I believe somewhere buried in the text on the webpage. It actually says that there's a five to ten minute break between every single talk . I certainly remember reading that somewhere. So yes , but yeah, honestly, this was not a perfect shortcut, but the amount of time this saved me overall, being able to say, Hey, grab the schedule off of this website please and then add it to my calendar . And that's exactly what it did. And now I know all the talks that are happening on Thursday and Friday . So I am very excited for that because now it'll just pop up on my phone and tell me what's happening next and the colleagues that I'm going with will once again believe that I have discovered how to control or just witchcraft of some kind or I've got a perfect memory. And the answer is I do not have a perfect memory . Witchcraft is an option , but honestly a little bit of automation goes a very long way here because it can just give you so much detail and make your life much easier if you would like it to. So yeah, I'm a big fan of the new shortcuts. It's taken a little getting used to not having the automation tab and so on and so forth , but I think it's a really good improvement for everybody overall. You know, for the super nerds who are used to having the tabs, it's still there. It's just a little hidden, but for most people, I think that this is going to be the way to go. English is going to end up as the primary language for programming. So let's get started with shortcuts. Very well put . There's, yeah, there's a lot to explore there. And again, people are, you know, continually finding new ASTs. I love this idea too of just again, opening it up to more folks and making it simpler . I think that's wonderful. So we'll be keeping our eyes on that as well as we go forth. Folks, that the end of the show. IOSAT .TV is where you go to get in touch . Don't forget about club twit at twitter slash club Twitter. If you're watching this now and you'd like to see this show and others