Siri and Shortcuts

Verbie exposes two actions to Siri and Apple's Shortcuts app, so the two things customers reach for most often can be started without navigating the app.

The two actions

Using Siri

Say any of:

• "Open Verbie Translate"
• "Open Translate in Verbie"
• "Start Sneaker Speaker in Verbie"
• "Practice Sneaker Speaker in Verbie"

Verbie opens and goes straight there. Start Sneaker Speaker begins playing at once, which makes it the natural way to start practice on a walk — the customer never has to look at the screen.

If Siri does not recognise the phrase, ask the customer to open Verbie once first (iOS needs to have seen the app run before its actions become available), and to include the app name in the phrase.

Adding Translate to the Home Screen

The first time the Translate tab is opened, Verbie shows a short guide for this:

1. Open Apple's Shortcuts app and find Open Translate under Verbie.
2. Add the action as a shortcut.
3. Use the Share button in Shortcuts, then choose Add to Home Screen.

The result is a Home Screen icon that opens straight into Translate. The same steps work for Start Sneaker Speaker.

Building bigger shortcuts

Both actions can be dropped into any shortcut or automation, which opens up things like:

• A Focus or automation that starts Sneaker Speaker when the customer connects to their car or headphones.
• A time-of-day automation — start Sneaker Speaker every weekday at 08:15, for the commute.
• A shortcut on the Lock Screen or in Control Centre for Translate.
• Adding Verbie to an existing "leaving the house" shortcut.

These are standard Shortcuts features; Verbie simply supplies the two actions.

What is not available

• There are no Shortcuts actions for the individual quiz categories, for Vocabulary Speaker, or for Bookmark Speaker.
• There is no action that returns data — for example, no shortcut that translates text and hands the result back to another app. Open Translate only opens the screen.
• There are no Home Screen widgets or Lock Screen widgets.
• Siri cannot answer questions about the customer's streak or XP.

Log requests for any of these as feature requests.

Common questions

"The shortcut opens Verbie but not Translate." Verbie was probably already running in the background on another tab. Ask the customer to close Verbie fully and try again, and note the iOS version if it repeats.

"Sneaker Speaker starts but immediately shows the membership screen." The free preview has run out, or the membership check has not finished yet. See 14 – Membership and billing.

"Sneaker Speaker starts, but nothing plays." The launch worked; the audio did not. See 11 – Audio, voices and storage.