Best Practice for Confirming Siri Shortcuts Availability Before Prompting User Interaction

What happens if you query the requestSiriAuthorization(_:) API? You may be misinterpreting the intent of that message in the documentation — since you do want your intents to be available in Siri and not just Shortcuts.

— Ed Ford,  DTS Engineer

Thanks for the reply!

Should the status always be authorized if I only want to use shortcut by siri?

It seems in my app, I can still use shortcut by calling siri even if the status is .denied, is it as expected? However, when the status is .denied, every time i want to use the sirikit feature, siri would pop up a dialog(totally automatically, and every time) saying "I'll need to access your app data to user the app. Is it ok?" and that sirikit feature only be available when I tap Allow or toggle the Use with Siri Requests to on.

I tried to call the requestSiriAuthorization(_:) in the app but nothing pops up on the screen.

I tried to call the requestSiriAuthorization(_:) in the app but nothing pops up on the screen.

Thanks for confirming. Is your intent a custom intent, or a system intent from one of the domains (like messaging)?

— Ed Ford,  DTS Engineer

It's a custom intent.

And I have another related question - I didn't find the api to check if Siri enabled or not at user's end(like if Siri is enabled on their phone), is it because this information is not shared with the app? Thanks.

Thanks for confirming this is a custom intent. In that case, checking for Siri authorization at the API level isn't required. The system may ask people to confirm their intention when using your intent through Sri for the first time, but that's not something you need to worry about at the API level.

I didn't find the api to check if Siri enabled or not at user's end(like if Siri is enabled on their phone), is it because this information is not shared with the app?

A custom SiriKit intent is surfaced in multiple places throughout the system experience, such as Spotlight, certain system provided widgets that suggest relevant actions to the user based on their use patterns, and more. Checking for Siri authorization isn't really useful, because that's a binary answer for only one place of many where your intent could run. Thus, the APIs are set up so that your app doesn't need to reason about all of the numerous situations.

I want to come back to your original premise:

My team wants to improve the user experience by giving an instructional audio prompt (e.g., "say 'hey Siri [action name]' if you want to [perform action]") to users. However, we want to ensure this prompt is only played when the user has already enabled Siri Shortcuts.

Since you are using SiriKit, your intent won't be eligible for direct innovation through Siri until the customer sets up their preferred phase for invoking your intent. There's a dedicated button you can add to your UI for that, along with some delegate methods that let you know when voice phrases are configured — those elements are demonstrated in the SoupChef sample code project, and so, those are your best choices to know the user's intention to specifically use Siri with your app.

Note that if you use the App Intents framework, which is our recommended path for brand new custom intents, the same basic ideas I list here apply — your intent will show up in many places throughout the system experience, and not just through Siri, and so the exact method of invoking your intent isn't a detail your implementation needs to worry about. The voice command setup is automatic, rather than requiring people to set their preferred phrase, so instead of a dedicated button to configure it, there's a UI element called the SiriTipView (and also SiriTipUIView if you're in UIKit instead of SwiftUI) to let people know that your app has an App Shortcut with a specific phrase.

— Ed Ford,  DTS Engineer