I love making shortcuts. Since the Shortcuts app was a third-party app called Shortucts, the ability to automate almost any task caught the eye, but more so how to do it. Logical blocks with actions, decisions around data, flows… a way of thinking that, in an extremely simplified way, is close to programming and that it can be a lot of fun.
Sometimes, however, there seems to be no way to find the exact thread of action to do something effectively. In these cases, what do you do? check some wires Reddit, looking for ideas, ask some people… or talk to ChatGPT. Yes, I could almost say that shortcuts on the iPhone aren’t made by me anymore, they’re made by ChatGPT.
A great helper to create any shortcut
Once you understand how the Shortcuts app works, build with these little blocks it’s almost a way of thinking. In this sense, deciding to use one or the other way to resolve the same situation is essential and has implications. Very uncomfortable is when you set up several conditionals only to, after half an hour, realize that if you had first filtered the information with a Get details of X you would have finished much sooner and better.
ChatGPT has already impressed us at Applesfera on more than one occasion. We actually used the Shortcuts app to br ing ChatGPT to Siri, but now we’ll go the other way. Actually OpenAI’s artificial intelligence includes Shortcuts app
The examples are numerous. “I want to create a shortcut that takes the last photo I took, scales it down, and adds it to a note that I use as a journal” He will walk you through the exact steps. Including that we have to filter the photos, that the best thing to do to reduce the size is to convert it to JPEG and use the slider to adjust the compression and everything else.
Here another example. “I need one that when I get to work text someone saying ‘I’m already in the office. What are the steps I need to take?’ Here ChatGPT explains that we will need, in fact, only one step, but then we can automate it thanks to the automations that the Shortcuts application offers us, as we can see in the screenshot above of these lines, the AI still makes a few mistakes, but definitely gives us some good ideas.
He certainly doesn’t do the shortcuts for us, but Knowing what we want to do makes it easy to get personalized instructions. More if we ask you for a step that leaves too much in the air or on which we need more details. A step forward so that, thanks to the Shortcuts application, our iPhone does what we want, even automatically. “I want a shortcut to email the last photo I took” and that’s it.
In Applesphere | Seven little-known shortcuts for the iPhone, but essential in my daily life