Empower your intents

Overview

• SiriKit encompasses the Intents and Intents UI frameworks which you use to integrate your services with Siri, Shortcuts, and maps

• In iOS 14 you can use intents to add configuration and intelligence to widgets

• An Intents UI app extension displays custom UI in the Siri shortcuts or maps interface

• An Intents app extension receives user requests from surrogate and turns them into app specific actions such as sending the message

In-app intent handling

• New in iOS 14

• When should you use it?

  • When the intent controls media playback/workouts

  • When the intent affects the apps user interface live on screen

  • When the intent needs more memory (e.g. photo/video editing)

How to adopt in-app intent handling

• Make sure to support multiple windows

• When your app is launched in response to a SiriKit request, it will be launched without any UIScene object connected to your app

• List all intents that you would like to handle inside of your application in the Support intents section of your apps target

• Implement the AppDelegate’s application(_:handlerFor:)

What’s new in iOS 14

• Rich Disambiguation:

  • In iOS 13 we were able to provide a list of options in case of ambiguity

  • This year we can add an image and a subtitle for each option

  • We can tell Siri to paginate our items (to present to the user)

• Dynamic Search for dynamic options

• Parameters can be mark configurable and resolvable separately. Siri and the Shortcuts app will not resolve parameters which are marked as unresolvable

Tips

• Custom intents deprecation

  • We can now mark intents as deprecated in the Xcode 12 inspector.

  • This will be shown in the shortcuts.app:

• • The action will be hidden when creating new shortcuts

• Custom classes names:

  • Classes are generated for you when defining when custom intents, custom types, or custom enums

  • You can now specify your generated class name in the Xcode inspector of your intent

  • Alternatively, you can specify a common class prefix used for all custom intense types and enums in the project document inspector of your target where the code generation needs to happen