A Siri Shortcut activated by the phrase “Hey, Siri, I’m being pulled over” could prove valuable in the event of a police traffic stop. The shortcut triggers your iPhone to start recording video from its front-facing camera, pauses any music, sends your location to a trusted contact, and uploads the video to iCloud or another cloud server of your choice.

The shortcut is designed to help protect users during interactions with law enforcement.

I live in Germany, and even though my German is fine, I often get beaten by notices and signs. In my native England, signs and notices are snappy. They use few words, and often annoying slogans, to get the point across. In Germany, an A4 (legal-size) sheet of paper with densely spaced type is the norm. And that’s just from neighbors complaining about people leaving their strollers on the wrong side of the entrance hall.

So, I decided to do something about it. I wrote a Siri Shortcut that scans one of these German essays using the iPhone’s camera, translates it, and shows it to you. There are apps that can do something similar, but my shortcut is way better, for several reasons.

The first public beta of iOS 13 is finally available to public testers.

Apple launched iOS 13 public beta 1 and iPadOS public beta 1 this morning. The software gives everyone the opportunity to try out all the new features, like the system-wide Dark Mode that looks absolutely beautiful. However, you might not want to take the jump quite yet.

The iOS 13 Shortcuts app brings plenty of radical changes — automatic scheduled and location-based shortcuts, for example — but one super-neat new feature will make a world of difference. Now, if you have a compatible iPhone, you can combine NFC tags with Shortcuts. That is, you can run any shortcut just by tapping your iPhone onto an NFC sticker.

Seriously. Pretty wild, right? You could tap your iPhone onto a sticker atop a speaker in your kitchen, and it would start playing the radio, for instance. Let’s check out how NFC shortcuts will work.

Some of the best new iOS 12 features should come to the Mac later this year.

Apple reportedly plans to make iOS and macOS much more alike, and macOS 10.15 supposedly will add Siri Shortcuts, Screen Time and more to the Mac.

Malicious Siri Shortcuts are a real possibility warns one developer, so users need to start treating all of them as potential threats. He calls on Apple to fix their problems.

Shortcuts debuted last fall in iOS 12. They are small apps that can be used to automate iOS features. That apparently makes them well suited for creating malware.

You can now use Siri to check up on product availability or the whereabouts of your latest orders, courtesy of the official Apple Store app for iOS.

Version 5.2 of the app adds new Siri Shortcuts support, letting you create custom voice commands to carry out these tasks without having to open the app.

Streaming music company Deezer wants to make it easier for users to play the music they want — by adding support for Siri Shortcuts. This means that you can now access your jam (as the kids say) by asking Deezer to “Play my favorite tracks.”

That puts 53 million tracks — including new releases, albums and curated playlists — at your fingertips at the tip of your tongue. And Deezer thinks it has the added secret sauce to make this extra special, too.

Package-tracking app Deliveries has long been one of our favorite iOS apps, consolidating info on all our various package deliveries into one easy-to-use tool.

Thanks to a new update, it just got even better, too. Thanks to added support for iOS 12’s Siri Shortcuts, you can now check up on the latest status of in-transit deliveries using your voice. What could be easier?

Today we’re going to make a Siri Shortcut that takes any text, converts it into English, and copies it to the clipboard. Never again will you have to struggle with a foreign menu on a web page, or a snippet of text from a non-English news site.

There are a few ways to translate text and websites on iOS, but this shortcut has two big advantages: It’s really, really fast, and it automatically copies the result to the clipboard. If you ever used the otherwise-excellent Microsoft Translate share extension, you will already be sick of having to manually select the result in a tiny window, and then use the share sheet again just to copy it.