The report highlights that the long-awaited Siri AI revamp finally landed this week with the arrival of iOS 27—but aside from the fresh Siri, iPhone users got another Apple Intelligence-enabled superpower.
The report highlights that i’m talking about the Shortcuts app , a longstanding iOS capability that lets users create powerful automations capable of doing everything from making GIFs and kicking off timers to marking up images and controlling smart home devices.
The report highlights that i’ve tried tinkering with it in the past only to give up after a few broken workflows. The whole process always seemed more oriented toward coders than everyday users. But with its modular building blocks and myriad options, the Shortcuts app is—or was —notoriously tough to use.
As part of the ongoing story, with its fresh prompting abilities, you simply tell your iPhone the shortcut you want to create and the model does the rest, quickly constructing your workflow and allowing you to edit it afterwards. Now with iOS 27, the Shortcuts app has gained a much-needed capability: the ability to create and edit Shortcuts using natural-language prompts, courtesy of the same Apple Intelligence models that now power Siri.
In a fresh development, so while you can arrange the Shortcuts app’s collection of Tinkertoy-like blocks in a wide variety of ways, you can’t create fresh ones from scratch. Unlike ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork, which could theoretically let you build pretty much anything, the iOS Shortcuts app is limited by the actions, scripts, controls, and functions in its bag of tricks.
According to the latest update, still, with its fresh prompting abilities, you can use the Shortcuts app to create repeatable iPhone workflows that chain multiple actions together, and we’re going to start with an easy one: a one-tap daily digest.
According to the latest update, just fire up the Shortcuts app, tap the “+” button at the bottom of the screen, and type (or say) this prompt:.
Industry observers note that give me a daily digest of the weather, my calendar events and reminders, and triage my email and messages.
Industry observers note that after a minute or so, the app will come back with a freshly minted Daily Digest shortcut that’ll fetch a weather report, assemble your daily agenda, and summarize the emails and text messages you’ve recently received.
As part of the ongoing story, just give the Shortcuts app your prompt, and you’ll window up with a completed shortcut in roughtly a minute.
As part of the ongoing story, ben Patterson/Foundry.
According to the latest update, here, you can tweak the options that Apple Intelligence has picked for you (such as changing the number of emails or messages it summarizes), or you can tap the Apple Intelligence button in the top-right corner of the screen to request changes using a prompt. Tap the Edit button to see the building blocks of your fresh shortcut, which you previously would have had to put together yourself.
As part of the ongoing story, in other words, there won’t be swarms of AI agents scouring everything in your Calendar, Mail, and Messages apps. One thing you’ll notice in the shortcut is that Apple Intelligence only comes into play for the penultimate step, where it summarizes the details gathered by the previous shortcuts blocks.
According to the latest update, you can swap out the Apple Intelligence model that compiles your daily digest in just a few taps.
As part of the ongoing story, ben Patterson/Foundry.
According to the latest update, the options are “On Device,” “Cloud” (Apple’s cloud-based model), “Cloud Pro” (which offers enhanced reasoning capabilities at the cost of limited usage), and “ChatGPT.”. Speaking of the Apple Intelligence block, you can switch out the model used for that action by tapping Cloud.
In a fresh development, on Device choked the shortcut entirely (“The request exceeded the maximum allowed length”) while ChatGPT appeared confused, spitting out a template rather than the digest itself. In my tests, Cloud Pro delivered the most polished results while Cloud did the job with a few rough edges.
The report highlights that you can also add it as a home screen widget. Once you’re all set, tap the Share button to add your fresh shortcut to the home screen, then tap it whenever you want your daily digest.