I’ve been optimising my iPad for study recently, trying to make it a portable, one-stop shop for reading and prep on-the-move. It’s no doubt another flex of my childhood awe for Inspector Gadget’s niece Penny, and her computer-in-a-book that could do everything.
Anyway, it’s led me to discover lots of features I half knew about, but had ignored for the duration of my Apple fanboydom. And one of the biggest revelations of rediscovery has been the Apple Shortcuts app.
In a nutshell, Shortcuts allows you to bundle all sorts of custom process chains into a single, iconisable action. For example, a shortcut could retrieve something, do something with the result, then present it in a certain way. People use them for all sorts of admin tasks – collecting stock prices and collating them in a spreadsheet with a single click, for instance.
The cool thing is that many third-party apps have extensions that you can link into shortcuts. ChatGPT, for example, which I find invaluable as a quick summary or explanatory tool, can be part of an action chain. And you can trigger chains not just with clicks, but from documents, via the share link.
Shortcuts for Smart Study : Brief Description
Using the app, I put together a quick shortcut I called “Brief Description”. It sends the current PDF (from a browser window, or from the Files app), to ChatGPT, prompting it for a one-paragraph summary.
A screenshot from Apple Shortcuts of a ‘Brief Explanation’ action using ChatGPT.
As you can see, one of the best things about it is how you assemble a shortcut in more or less natural language, as you select items via an intuitive click-and-build interface. There are also plenty of resources for getting started and pushing the boundaries of it (like this very clued-up YouTube channel!).
The result of my shortcut offers a great way to get a paper summary, whatever the language:
Screenshot of an Apple Shortcuts link in the share menu.
When working through a bunch of resources, it’s great to ascertain in a click or two whether it might be a worthwhile full read, making this a brilliant time-saver. It’s even more powerful when combined with ChatGPT’s new(ish) memory features – my account ‘knows’ what I’ve been working on from recent chats, so is even better able to judge what’s useful.
For sure, I’ll be exploring more of this over the coming weeks, as it’s clear I’ve barely scratched the surface of how useful it could be yet. Have you used Apple Shortcuts to create smart study hacks? Let us know in the comments!