Our trip into Siri Shortcuts!

Lucio De Rosa

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Published in

Apple Developer Academy | Federico II

4 min readApr 8, 2020

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Hello everybody from Lucio and Angelo, also known as
Rinchiusi_In_Casa !
The name of our team, obliviously, is due to the actual situation of quarantine we’re living in Italy because literally we are locked into our houses.

So this is a short summary of how we started this “trip” into the world of the Siri Shortcuts!

Why do we choose the Siri Shortcuts as our challenge?

We have chosen the Siri Shortcuts as our challenge because we think that this technology (the voice-recognition) will represent the future in every field and will find easy application in several context.
We have never applied a so particular approach like voice recognition so we wanted to get in depth about it.

But firstly a short introduction of what a Siri Shortcut is!

What is a Shortcut?

So what are Siri Shortcuts? They are actions Siri can predict and provide to the user in places such as Spotlight search, Lock Screen etc. Your app can provide these actions to Siri, while the user interacts with it.
Each shortcut can be defined and set to trigger with custom Siri voice commands. Shortcuts sync across devices through iOS and can be run by any device Siri exists on!

Our Idea!

It’s is the first time we have thought about a Siri Shortcut so it has been difficult to find the easiest way to approach to the challenge.

First of all we needed a problem to solve using the voice as a starting point.
Voice should represent the input to activate different steps which lead to the final resolution.

We wondered how we can follow this process and we are considering some daily problems which everybody has to face up to.

It happens that everybody, after a very busy and stressful day
we often wonder how and when we spent our money.

A survey among our friends and our colleagues at the Apple Academy has revealed that most people ignore the exact amount of money used for shopping. It is very easy to waste money especially when we use cards for payment.

So after our researches it came up that we weren’t the only ones with this type of problem because in most cases all of us cannot organise their outgoings in the best way possible.
The majority of people who have this topology of problem are especially people like us, students and unemployed.

Therefore we decided to create a very fast shortcut to make useful to check all of your outcomes of the day.

So we started to create a plan to approach the challenge.
Our main fundamentals for this challenge were:

learn what a Siri Shortcuts is through the Apple Documentation, Apple WWDC’s videos, various websites of the tech world, Medium’s articles and other stuff.
learn how to implement a Siri Shortcut through different guides, video on YouTube, Apple Developer’s Site, Apple Documentation.
explore the different implementations of the Shortcuts through surfing the web to see what the other developers have created thanks to their imagination. There are some sites with a lot of already done Shortcuts very useful for every typology of people.
create a sort of Container App (very basic) to put our Shortcut thanks to our experience made at the Apple Academy.

The Final Product.

Our final product cannot be considered final but it works as a virtual wallet which is made by invoking Siri and telling her this sentence “Ehi Siri how much money have I spent so far?”.

She will answer you with the amount of money you have spent until that request!

If you want the complete list of all of your purchases you can open the app and you will find what you are searching.

Of course you can add a purchase just telling her with a simple phrase: “Ehi Siri, I have spent this amount of money in this place”.