You Can Now Ask Apple Intelligence to Build iPhone Shortcuts for You

The iPhone's Shortcuts app has been around since 2018, and Engadget says it has recently gotten an AI boost. You can already load shortcuts made by other people, but now Apple Intelligence lets you create your own by describing what you want in everyday words. The writer says it is one of the few places where Apple's AI makes a meaningful difference.

To try it, you need iOS 27 and an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence. Open the Shortcuts app, which comes preinstalled, though you can download it from the App Store if you deleted it. Tap the big plus icon at the bottom, type what you want the shortcut to do, and tap the play button to test it when it is ready.

How well does it work? In theory, Apple Intelligence should be able to help build anything the app can automate. In practice, it sometimes needs trial and error or manual changes. Shortcuts made this way can still be edited as usual. The writer asked for a shortcut that would turn the screen gray whenever Instagram opened and back to color when it closed. The first half worked, but the second did not, so the writer ended up making two shortcuts. The app rarely refuses a request. When it was given an impossible task, it sometimes said so. More often it strung together actions that were close but not right. For instance, when asked to turn the iPhone off at 20 percent battery, it simply locked the screen.

There are other improvements. If you build a shortcut by hand, you can choose Apple Intelligence to get the Use Model action, which sends a request to an AI model, then uses the answer in later steps. You can pick between the Cloud, Cloud Pro and On-Device models, or choose ChatGPT. The writer found that the Apple models handle writing text quite well. One shortcut fetched an article from a web address, summarized it and saved the summary to the Notes app. You can make a shortcut show up as an option when you tap the Share button in any app.