As a huge Apple fan, I eagerly awaited the launch of iOS 12. With iOS 12, Apple has launched the Siri Shortcuts app which allows anyone to create a “Shortcut”: a series of steps that can interact with third party applications, the iOS device, and Siri.
As soon as I got my hands on the app, I saw quite a number of similarities between Shortcuts and ServiceNow’s Flow Designer. Steps within Shortcuts can be sequenced and they have inputs and outputs (“Magic Variables”) similar to “Data Pills” within Flow Designer.
The Shortcuts app has a number of easy to use “Actions” which immediately reminded me of Flow Designer’s “Spokes”. In the Shortcuts app, many “developer” or “advanced” user Actions exist. After seeing some advanced actions such as “Get Contents of URL” and “Get Dictionary from Input” I wondered, can I link a Shortcut to ServiceNow?
Within a short amount of time I was able to create a pretty useful Shortcut. The Shortcut creates a ServiceNow Incident using Siri dictation. It then reads back the Incident number it created via the table REST API. This is obviously a quick proof of concept, but it’s clear that the possibilities are endless. With no code, you could grab native device data such as Location or System IP address, pass that data to a REST API, and parse the results back to spoken text.
Some areas for improvement include using an API key rather than a username/password variable or even using the new Chat framework that ServiceNow has released with London.
For anyone interested, here is the Shortcut. All you need to do is download the iOS application “Shortcuts” and install this. Once installed, add in your instance, username, and password.
I am really excited to see what clever ideas the community comes up with here. Give it a try!
