Building Great Shortcuts

Hello. My name is Ian and I am an engineer on the Shortcuts Team. Today I'm going to talk to you about how users can build their own shortcuts and how you can ensure that they have the best possible experience. I'm going to cover three topics today. First, intents from your app can now be editable by the user as actions. I'm going to walk you through the parts of an action and show how users can configure them inside of their Shortcuts.

You've built great Shortcuts and we want to make sure that you can get them in front of your users, as well. I'm going to talk about some ways that you can showcase the Shortcuts from your app using Add to Siri and other APIs.

And later on, we're going to build a multistep shortcut and make actions that work great with others by using input and output. Let's get started.

I have an app called Soup Chef. And as you know, it's a super way to order clam chowder or tomato soup for delivery and pickup. And Soup Chef has made an intent for ordering soup. So, here's that inside of the Shortcuts Editor, where actions are configured.

Every action can have parameters that can be edited by the user. And these parameters were defined inside of the Intent definition file.

Until the user enters a value, parameters show the display name. And because this display name can sometimes be shown as a title in configuration UI, make sure that the display name is always capitalized.

The parameter summary is a sentence that's shown to the user that describes what the shortcut will do when it's run.

Summaries should read like a sentence and start with a verb. There's no need to write the