Apple Unveils AI-Enhanced Shortcuts and Home App at WWDC 2026

During today's keynote for WWDC 2026, Apple's leadership discussed the long-awaited new capabilities for artificial intelligence on its devices. One segment of the presentation highlighted how the Shortcuts app will start taking advantage of the new AI tools. Going forward, Apple Intelligence can create shortcuts based on natural language descriptions. The demo highlighted how AI could help a user set up a complicated shortcut, like messaging a spouse when departing the office each weekday. With a description like "when I'm leaving work, message Pedro with my ETA" the Shortcuts app can use Apple Intelligence to take actions such as: assessing the person's location at the workplace; using Maps to determine travel times; and sending a message to the correct contact with that information. Apple There's also a new Apple Intelligence layer coming to the Home app. For starters, the app now collapses activities into a single notification that is refreshed with any changes rather than pelting your home screen with alerts if there's a lot happening. As a quality of life improvement, that should be a nice bonus (assuming it works better than Apple's prior attempt to summarize notifications). The app will also highlight the most important-seeming clips based on AI analysis at the top of the home screen. Apple's Home program can also now analyze recorded clips from multiple compatible cameras and offer summaries of what happened across that footage. Critters destroying stuff seems to be the industry-accepted way to show this off, and Apple had a raccoon handling that in its videos. But this is the sort of capability that could be genuinely helpful as a safety tool. AI-powered searches can be performed across multiple cameras to find visuals of a particular event. 4K video will also be available on supported cameras, although the presentation didn't offer specifics on how widespread that support will be at the start.