what's new with app intents
Asked on 07/30/2024
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App Intents have received several updates and enhancements at WWDC 2024. Here are some of the key highlights:
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Expanded Scope: Previously, app intents were meant to be the most habitual tasks in your app that could be useful outside of your app. In iOS 18, this guidance has changed to go beyond common functionality. Now, anything your app does can be an app intent (Design App Intents for system experiences).
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New APIs and Developer Improvements: New APIs have been introduced to allow you to index your app entities in Spotlight, bringing powerful semantic search to app intents. There are also developer experience improvements to make it easier to work with app intents (What’s new in App Intents).
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Integration with Siri: App intents can now leverage Apple Intelligence, making them a powerful way for your app to tap into Siri's enhanced capabilities. Siri can now invoke any item from your app's menus and respond more conversationally (Platforms State of the Union).
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Design Guidance: Updated guidance on designing app intents includes structuring them to be flexible and readable across many configurations and use cases. It's important to avoid making several different intents for the same task and to ensure that app intents represent the underlying task rather than specific UI elements (Design App Intents for system experiences).
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Parameter Handling: When structuring app intents, it's crucial to make sure the parameter summary is always readable as a sentence, regardless of the selected mode. This helps users understand what the app intent does when exploring in the shortcuts drawer (Design App Intents for system experiences).
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Background Capabilities: If your app supports live activities, audio playback, or recording, you can create app intents that make it possible to perform these actions from the background, which is great for simple intents that don't require further in-app action (Design App Intents for system experiences).
For a more detailed overview, you can check out the sessions:
Bring your app to Siri
Learn how to use App Intents to expose your app’s functionality to Siri. Understand which intents are already available for your use, and how to create custom intents to integrate actions from your app into the system. We’ll also cover what metadata to provide, making your entities searchable via Spotlight, annotating onscreen references, and much more.
Design App Intents for system experiences
App Intents power system experiences in controls, Spotlight, Siri, and more. Find out how to identify the functionality that’s best for App Intents, and how to use parameters to make these intents flexible. Learn how to use App Intents to allow people to take action outside your app, and see examples of when to navigate into your app to show contextual information.
Bring your app’s core features to users with App Intents
Learn the principles of the App Intents framework, like intents, entities, and queries, and how you can harness them to expose your app’s most important functionality right where people need it most. Find out how to build deep integration between your app and the many system features built on top of App Intents, including Siri, controls and widgets, Apple Pencil, Shortcuts, the Action button, and more. Get tips on how to build your App Intents integrations efficiently to create the best experiences in every surface while still sharing code and core functionality.