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.