Siri has plenty of problems, but it just got one more: a lawsuit claiming Apple’s technology is infringing on patents belonging to another company.

The company in question, Advanced Voice Recognition Systems, is suing Apple for infringing on its previously held patent “Speech Recognition and Transcription Among Users Having Heterogeneous Protocols.”

Apple’s allegedly offending products include *deep breath* the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, HomePod, and Apple TV. Everything that runs Siri, basically!

Craig Federighi is no longer in charge of Siri. Responsibility for Apple’s troubled voice assistant has been given to John Giannandrea, who is now in charge of all Apple’s artificial intelligence efforts.

Siri is seen as poor competition for Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Assistant. Its weakness is hurting sales of Apple products, including the HomePod.

Apple has made its new Shortcuts app available for beta testing, and over the weekend I took a look. Shortcuts is Apple’s new automation app for iOS 12, which integrates with Siri and lets you build all kinds of amazing automated workflows, from shutting your house down when you go to sleep, to downloading videos from YouTube and saving the them to iCloud. Shortcuts is really just the new name for Workflow, an existing iOS automation app that Apple bought a year or so back.

Let’s take a look at what Apple has put in this first Shortcuts beta.

Apple said Siri would be smarter with iOS 12. The digital assistant will also multitask with the help of a native app.

A single command will kick Siri into high gear through an app called Siri Shortcuts, now available in a beta version to developers through the TestFlight platform.

Developers received an early 4th of July present from Apple today in the form of banging batch of new betas for iOS 12, watchOS 5 and tvOS 12.

The third beta for iOS 12 arrives two weeks after Apple seeded the last software update to developers that contained a number of UI tweaks and performance enhancements. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV all received some software loving from Apple today, but it looks like the next macOS Mojave beta is still baking.

Most people would agree that Siri is way behind its competitors. But Apple recently made moves that indicate it’s working to improve this voice assistant.

A British survey discovered what smartspeaker owners actually use them for. This could help Apple decide what new features to add to Siri, as well as the ones that need shoring up.

Siri Shortcuts are the iOS way to automate actions you do over and over. The WWDC 2018 keynote gave an examples of chaining together a bunch of these actions into one shortcut — order your favorite “coffee,” and give you directions to work, or switch on the lights at home one whole hour before you get there in order to, I don’t know, waste electricity? To trigger these little automations, you just tell Siri, using a pre-chosen keyword/name.

However, you don’t alway want to put together lots of steps. Sometimes you just want Siri to carry out a single action with a Shortcut. For instance, opening up your favorite news site in Safari, or sending a message to your spouse, or viewing your most recent photos. The good news is, you can do all of these today, in the first iOS 12 beta, even without the fancy new Siri Shortcuts app.

You no longer need to be a developer to try Apple’s biggest software updates of 2018.

Public testers can now get their hands on the first public beta builds of iOS 12 and tvOS 12 that bring tons of UI changes and feature improvements to the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.

Siri on HomePod is acceptable for quickly playing an album or a playlist, or even for adding a track to the existing up-next queue. But what if you want to switch the order of some songs in that queue, or delete tracks? Or maybe just use your iPhone to skip tracks, or control the volume of your HomePod without having to talk to the damn thing all the time?

Today we shall find out how.