While we wait for Apple Intelligence and whatever form OpenAI’s integration takes in iOS 18, the native ChatGPT app has at least allowed us to inject a touch of modernity to Apple Shortcuts.
My exploits (or lack of) with the much neglected, and often seemingly unapproachable, Shortcuts app deserves a future write-up of its own. It’s fair to say though, like the vast majority of Apple users, I’ve never really found a coherent use for it, despite a deep integration with HomeKit in my household.
That said, we’ve always had a rule at the design agencies I’ve worked at (as I’m sure do many similar technical professions, not least the fundamentals of coding) – if a task is taking you longer than you feel it should, or more specifically, you find yourself doing multiple repeated manual actions, there’s almost certainly a quicker way of doing it via scripting.
With that mentality, I’ve started creating a few simple shortcuts for everyday smart home tasks. Most are quite boring, but it struck me that it might be nice to add a bit of ChatGPT personality to some.
Here’s a cute example that resets my office to its usual state, but also delivers a bit of positivity each morning.
Hopefully we’ll soon get a revamped Shortcuts app that not only makes logic a lot easier easy to implement, but also takes advantage of next-gen intelligence. For now, we can have a tiny bit of fun.