Apple adds natural-language shortcut creation to iOS 27 via Apple Intelligence

The long-awaited Siri AI revamp finally landed this week with the arrival of iOS 27—but aside from the new Siri, iPhone users got another Apple Intelligence-enabled superpower.

I'm talking about the Shortcuts app, a longstanding iOS feature 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.

But with its modular building blocks and myriad options, the Shortcuts app is—or was—notoriously tough to use. 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.

Now with iOS 27, the Shortcuts app has gained a much-needed feature: the ability to create and edit Shortcuts using natural-language prompts, courtesy of the same Apple Intelligence models that now power Siri. With its new 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.

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. So while you can arrange the Shortcuts app's collection of Tinkertoy-like blocks in a wide variety of ways, you can't create new ones from scratch.

Still, with its new 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.

Just fire up the Shortcuts app, tap the "+" button at the bottom of the screen, and type (or say) this prompt:

Give me a daily digest of the weather, my calendar events and reminders, and triage my email and messages.

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.

Tap the Edit button to see the building blocks of your new shortcut, which you previously would have had to put together yourself. 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.

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. In other words, there won't be swarms of AI agents scouring everything in your Calendar, Mail, and Messages apps.

Speaking of the Apple Intelligence block, you can switch out the model used for that action by tapping Cloud. 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."

In my tests, Cloud Pro delivered the most polished results while Cloud did the job with a few rough edges. 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.

Once you're all set, tap the Share button to add your new shortcut to the home screen, then tap it whenever you want your daily digest. You can also add it as a home screen widget.