One of the most common compliments – or complaints – I often come across in the phone community is that “the iPhone just works.” It is very fast, smooth and user-friendly. For those seeking power user nirvana, Android is the place to tinker with custom ROMs and enjoy the joys of customizability.
However, that doesn’t mean the iPhone can’t do its own tricks. On the contrary, it can perform truly impressive multi-level automation wizardry. The best example? Shortcuts. The pre-installed app is pretty impressive, especially with its new AI capabilities.
I recently created a “Storage” shortcut for storing important nuggets of information. But instead of the tedious work that comes with bookmarking pages, copying and pasting text and links, or taking screenshots, I combined it all. With a single press of a button, the shortcut takes a screenshot, an AI summarizes the screen content, gives it a heading, search-friendly hashtags and saves everything in a specific app.
The Shortcuts app can actually do a lot more thanks to AI. You can either designate ChatGPT for the task, use an on-device AI model, or hand off more demanding tasks to Apple’s private cloud computing for more secure processing. I’ve created a few AI-powered shortcuts to give you an idea of how handy they can be in everyday life.
Find movie or TV show details from random clips
Let’s get straight to the point. Here’s how a custom shortcut took me from a random clip to its streaming destinations:
TikTok and Instagram are full of channels posting clips from TV shows and movies. These clips often go viral, but in many cases the name of the film is not mentioned either as an overlay or in the descriptions. It’s an extremely frustrating situation, especially if you decided to watch the whole thing after watching a 30 or 60 second snippet.
Luckily, with a single press of the action button, you can perform a multi-step action that will give you the name of a movie or TV show along with a few other details, such as: B. the location for streaming. I just created a shortcut that gets the job done in about six to seven seconds.
The easiest way is to use Apple’s cloud-based AI model. You trigger the link, a screenshot is taken and forwarded to the AI. Within a few seconds, the AI will inform you about the scene, the name of the actor(s), the movie or TV show, and a few other details in a pop-up window. It’s not 100% accurate, but when it comes to major entertainment franchises, it gets the job done.
The most accurate approach is to use Google Lens. Broadly speaking, this is how it works. Let’s say you’re watching a clip on Instagram. Once you trigger the shortcut, the phone takes a screenshot and automatically forwards it to Google Lens. The image is scanned and the name of the movie or TV show appears on the screen.
You can stop the link there. But I took it a step further and customized it even further. After the Google Lens step, I created a five second delay after which a popup appears at the top of the screen. Here you just type the name of the movie or TV series and press Enter.
The name is passed to the AI, which then tells you where that particular movie or TV show is available to watch, rent, or stream. Think of it like Shazam, but for videos you see on the internet. I also experimented with using Perplexity in the same shortcut, which also gave me additional nuggets of information like a plot summary, rating, cast, and more.
This is what the interface looks like when I include Perplexity in the shortcut:
A Recipe Assistant: From Clicks to Counter Skills
I cook. A lot. Of course my social media feed knows this too. However, not all of the pictures and videos of delicacies I see on Instagram Reels come with a full recipe. In some healthy cases, I don’t even know what I’m seeing. Here too, AI comes to the rescue.
Normally I would take a screenshot and do a reverse Google image search. Once the identification is complete, I would conduct another round of searching to find the recipe, understand its origins, and get details about its nutritional value. Of course, taking notes manually is also necessary.
Instead, I do everything with a single tap by activating the Recipe shortcut. Let’s say I look at a friend’s story on Instagram where he shared pictures of food. Once the shortcut is activated, a screenshot is taken and the image is forwarded to ChatGPT.
The AI identifies the dish, recalls the entire recipe, lists all the ingredients and cooking instructions, as well as a brief overview of the delicacy and its nutritional value for a single serving. All of these details, along with an image of the screenshot, are then neatly saved to my Apple Notes.
Again, you can replace ChatGPT with Google Lens for identification, but that would require an additional step of typing or copying and pasting the name of the dish. It’s not a big hassle, but it depends more on your personal preferences.
Custom file summary with a single tap
Apple has already integrated a summary function into the Apple Intelligence stack. You can activate it using the Writing Tools system and even access it in Safari’s reading mode. However, it doesn’t work with files stored locally on your phone.
Thanks to shortcuts, you can have ChatGPT analyze any file. In addition to images, OpenAI’s chatbot can also process XLSX, CSV, JSON and PDF files. Just make sure the ChatGPT extension is enabled in the Apple Intelligence & Siri dashboard in the Settings app.
Now you might be wondering why you should go through all this trouble instead of using the ChatGPT app? This is because it is a multi-step process. In addition, every time you upload a file to the ChatGPT app for analysis, you must provide appropriate instructions. With a custom shortcut, all you have to do is share the file via the share sheet.
More importantly, the shortcut allows you to follow a specific routine every time. For example, I configured it to select a title, show a quick summary, and then include any key takeaways as bullet points. For more flexibility, you can automatically copy the AI’s full response and save it as your own note. Simply put, you set the rules for file analysis.
Now there are two ways to use this shortcut. You browse the Files app, click the Share button, and then select the shortcut to complete the process. Or you can treat the shortcut as a standalone app and place its icon on the home screen. With the latter approach, you just need to tap on the icon and the file selection page will open automatically.
There’s a lot more you can do by pushing AI in creative ways in the Shortcuts app. All you need to do is find a task that can benefit from using AI and you can speed it up by simply creating a shortcut for it. And the best part is that all you have to do is describe the task at hand and the AI will do the rest.
