Using Apple's Foundational Models in the Shortcuts App

Here’s a short but sweet story about quickly getting access to Apple’s Foundational Models without writing a line of code.

A few weeks ago I installed iOS 26 on my iPhone and was keen to get a recap of what’s new. I did a few searches, came across this Apple Support page and scrolled through, expecting it to be mostly related to Liquid Glass and other small improvements. To my surprise I found the following section:

• Shortcuts
  • “Use model” is a new action that lets you tap directly into Apple Intelligence models to get responses that feed into the rest of your shortcut, or use ChatGPT if you want to tap into its broad world knowledge and expertise

That sounds exciting, but how easy is it to get working inside Shortcuts? Very easy actually!

As you can see from the video it’s straight forward to pass output from other actions into the model and provide a prompt on how to handle the information. This is a simple example, but if you’re a shortcuts power user or a developer then it’s easy to start thinking about some of the possibilities available to you.

Apple even offer suggestions for tasks the model on your device is well suited for in their developer documentation.

The example above uses the language model running on your device. If you needed more information on what to wear for the weather today, you can switch the model action over to using Apple’s Private Cloud Compute language model.

As the model runs in the cloud it has access to alot more resources than your device. Giving you the ability to recieve more information from your prompt.

I rarely use Shortcuts but I do like playing with it on occasion to see what is possible to achieve. With the introduction of accessing the foundational model on your device or in the cloud, this brings the power of prototyping with language models into Shortcuts.

So if you want a no code solution to understanding what Apple’s Foundational Model can do, Shortcuts is the way to do it!

Apple have a WWDC video from earlier this year all about the use model action and more.

The developer documentation also provides the most upto date information about using the Foundational Models. It includes how to integrate them into your own apps, as well as writing tools for the model to interact with to make them more Agentic.