Matthew Cassinelli, TechCrunch:
It’s undeniably convenient to get facts by speaking to the air, turning on the lights without lifting a finger or triggering a timer or text message — but so far, studies have shown people don’t use much more than these on a regular basis.
People don’t often do more than that because the assistants aren’t really ready for complex tasks yet, and when your assistant is limited to tasks inside your home or commands spoken into your phone, the drawbacks prevent you from going deep.
And:
In Apple’s ecosystem, you have Siri on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, CarPlay and any Mac. Add in Shortcuts on each of those devices (except Mac, but they still have Automator) and suddenly you have a plethora of places to execute all your commands entirely by voice.
And:
Even more important than all the places where you can use your assistant is how — with Shortcuts, Siri gets even better with each new app that people download.
And:
Shortcuts opens up those capabilities to Siri — every action you take in an app can be shared out with Siri, letting people interact right there inline or using only their voice, with the app running everything smoothly in the background.
Hard to overstate just how important Shortcuts is to Siri and to the Apple ecosystem. Rather than the ability to simply launch an app, Shortcuts gives you the ability to get inside your apps, accessing data and launching functionality exposed by the app’s developer. This is the power of AppleScript, but for voice and just made for Siri.
Terrific article by a former member of the Workflow team. Shortcuts is based on Workflow, the app Apple acquired last year, and is being rolled out in private beta now.
Actually, it’s easy to overstate the potential for Siri Shortcuts, in the same way that it’s easy to overstate the impact of AppleScript and Automator. For some people who made heavy use of it, AppleScript was an extraordinary technology, sometimes the reason they wouldn’t move to Windows. But very few people used it. For them, AppleScript might as well not exist. Probably most people who *did* use it couldn’t do any more than download a script. Lots of apps didn’t support AppleScript either, and many that did support it supported it so weakly that they might as well not have. So we’ll just have to see if that’s what will happen with Siri Shortcuts. If it turns into something that 1% of people use, then its potential will indeed have been overstated. Here’s hoping though.