We’ve launched two great new features in the latest NextThere update: Siri Shortcuts support and routes.
Siri shortcuts
You can now get real-time transport information from NextThere by just asking. Using iOS 12 you can set shortcuts that make sense to you, like “hey Siri, bus to work” or “hey Siri, when’s the train”.
You can set these up by tapping the destination picker dropdown on any stop. You get to pick the instruction you associate with each journey.
There’s a bit more to it than just voice shortcuts too: anything you’ve saved in NextThere can now be found in the Siri search on your phone, and Siri will learn your habits and start to provide suggestions just by pulling down the search bar.
If you look at the same thing in NextThere at the same time every day, it may even start showing up on your lock screen. This works on Apple Watch too if you’re using the Siri watch face and are near one of your saved stops.
If at first you don’t see the shortcuts in search suggestions, the iOS lock screen or the Siri watch face appear once you’ve upgraded to iOS 12 and watchOS 5, just keep using the app like normal so Siri can pick up your habits.
Routes
Sometimes customers know which bus route or train line they want to catch and don’t know the name of the stop. Sometimes you’re meeting someone and know what route they’re on — you just want to quickly lookup where their bus is.
So we’ve made it so you can now find and save routes through the search bar.
You get a detailed interactive map of the route and real-time vehicle locations, the next departures in each direction, current incidents and planned future disruptions.
The route screen automatically adjusts based on your location, intelligently working out each direction you can travel based on where you are. We paid careful attention to make sure it works great with complex branching train lines like Sydney’s T1 line and Brisbane’s train network.
And of course, you can add routes as shortcuts to Siri too through the iOS Settings app.
We’ve added more than 100 enhancements and fixes in this update: the maps draw more elegantly at different zoom levels, the themes look better on iPhone X, the Apple Watch app is faster, handoff is now supported.
We hope you find this update as useful as we do. Let us know what you think!
NextThere is available on the App Store in Australia, New Zealand and selected US cities.
