Apple revealed at its WWDC 2026 event that it has leveraged AI to make its visual scripting tool Shortcuts easier to use in iOS 27.
The Shortcuts app was built primarily for power users who want to automate repetitive tasks, create workflows, or set up actions for multiple apps. The new version of Shortcuts will instead allow users to create prompts and easily describe what they want to do.
This new feature leverages Apple Intelligence to help you make sense of natural language descriptions and build the necessary steps.
“Although very powerful, the process of creating these shortcuts can feel, well, complicated,” admitted Celsia Dantas, senior manager of home software product marketing, during the keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.
AI updates make the Shortcuts app more approachable and allow non-technical people to do more by not having to worry about finding the right app actions or variables.
Dantas also gave an example of how this feature could be leveraged in the real world, suggesting that users could design shortcuts that automatically notify their partner when they leave work and give them an estimated time of arrival home.
There’s no need to understand how to build this type of automation; users simply enter their requests and shortcuts bundle together the system and app actions they need. In this case, you’ll create an automation that runs a shortcut when the user leaves work, accesses the saved address, calculates arrival arrival time using Apple Maps, and sends an alert via Messages.
According to Apple, users can also make edits and changes with a description. For example, in the “clock out” example, users can post-edit and start playing their favorite podcast.
An updated version of Shortcuts will be rolled out to iOS 27 later this fall.
Stay up to date on WWDC 2026
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