Integrate your app with Siri: what Siri AI changes

What Apple has opened up in Siri AI

Apple announced it on its developer site: starting with the 27.3 betas of iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS, any developer can connect their app to Siri AI using App Intents, the framework an app uses to describe what it can do. Siri AI draws on the user's personal context, what is on screen and natural language to carry out those actions. Developers can also chain several of them into what Apple calls skills, to handle requests that take more than one step.

The examples reported by Cult of Mac and Infobae are everyday ones: checking a delivery, booking a table or placing an order, among others. Drawing on Apple documentation reported by The Verge, Infobae adds that sometimes users will not even need to name the app: it is enough for the app to be in the foreground, to be showing a Live Activity on the Lock Screen, or to already be the subject of the conversation with Siri.

This is a developer preview, and it comes with conditions. According to Apple, apps with these features will reach customers in a few months, and App Store submissions open in the spring. Siri AI needs an Apple Intelligence-enabled device, works in English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, is not available to under-13s and has daily usage limits. In the European Union it is currently unavailable on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch; Apple says it is working with the EU to find a way forward.

The phone calls at Ainhoa's salon

Imagine Ainhoa runs a neighbourhood hair salon with three chairs. Two years ago she launched a booking app: her clients pick a day, a time and a stylist, and she sees a full diary on her phone. The app works. And yet the phone never stops ringing.

On an ordinary Tuesday, scissors in hand, Ainhoa takes four calls in an hour. One client wants to move her Thursday appointment to Friday. Another cannot remember whether he booked five or six o'clock. A third asks if she can bring her son along too. All of that can be done in the app, but moving an appointment means opening it, going to the profile, finding the booking, cancelling it and making a new one. Calling is quicker.

Why do customers call when there is an app?

Plenty of businesses with their own app will recognise this. The app was designed around screens: a menu, a product page, a calendar, a profile. But customers do not think in screens; they think in what they want to get done: “move my appointment”, “when am I booked in?”, “the usual, please”.

When the thing people do most often sits five or six taps away, they look for a shortcut, and the shortcut is usually a phone call or a message. The app stays installed, but it only gets used for the first booking.

What does each phone call cost your business?

Every call interrupts paid work, such as a half-finished haircut, and leaves someone else waiting in the chair. Appointments changed over the phone get written down in a hurry, sometimes wrongly, and a slot that frees up at the last minute is never seen by another client.

Apple's announcement adds a cost further down the line. If assistants start carrying out tasks inside apps, an app that has never spelt out what it can do will give Siri AI little to work with, and may be left out of that way of using a phone.

What should you do before you integrate your app with Siri?

The fact that it is not yet available in the EU is no reason to hold back, because the first job also improves your app today, assistant or no assistant:

• For one normal week, note down what customers ask you for by phone or message. Those are the tasks your app is not handling well.
• Pick the three that come up most and write them the way a customer would say them: “change my appointment”, “when am I booked in”, “order the usual”.
• Count how many taps each one takes in your app today and find a way to bring it down to one or two.
• Ask whoever builds your app to make those tasks named actions, which is exactly what App Intents lets an app describe so that Siri AI can use them.

For Ainhoa, the three tasks are obvious: book, move an appointment and check the next one. If the app handles them in a couple of taps, she is already better off today. And if her clients can one day ask Siri AI to do them, they will already be written down and named.

How we approach apps at digizone

At digizone we design and build mobile apps around what each user does, not around a list of screens. We start by finding out what gets repeated in your business, then build the app so that it is the easiest thing to do.

One example is NeighborPark, a service that lets residents book and pay by the hour for the garage spaces left empty in their building. We built the whole product, with an installable app for residents and a web dashboard for the management, and residents now book and pay in seconds.

One task, done properly

There is no need to rebuild the app, or to wait and see what Apple agrees with the EU. At Ainhoa's salon, the first version would be a button to move an appointment: open the app, tap the booking and choose another slot. Launch it, see whether calls about rescheduling drop and, if they do, move on to the next task on the list. That is how an app people actually use grows: one task at a time.

If you would like to see how it would work for you, our free workshop, in Spanish, walks through it step by step.