What are Vocal Shortcuts in iOS 18 and How Do They Work?

“Vocal Shortcuts” is a brand-new Accessibility feature that has arrived in iOS 18. Designed to let you carry out preferred actions faster through custom phrases, it ensures you don’t need to dig deep to perform the oft-repeated tasks or something that you need to do time and time again. However, if you are wondering what the iOS 18 Vocal Shortcuts are and how they work on iPhone, now is the right time to sort it out.

iOS 18 Vocal Shortcuts: All You Need to Know

“Vocal Shortcuts” are actually custom phrases that you can use to perform specific actions. Yeah, you got that right! In iOS 18, you can teach your iPhone to recognize a custom phrase like “Go” to quickly carry out the desired action like activating the “Control Center” on your device.

Apart from supporting a variety of system actions (i.e Control Center, Notification Center, Lock Screen, and Reachability) and Accessibility features (i.e AssistiveTouch, Accessibility Shortcut, Classic Invert, Color Filters, and more), it also works with Siri Shortcuts. Yeah, you got that right, you can also link a custom vocal phrase with a Siri Shortcut for an instant launching experience.

As for device compatibility, “Vocal Shortcuts” supports all iPhone models that can run iOS 18. That means if you have an iPhone XR/XS or later, you can get the most out of this Accessibility feature. Unlike many other new features such as Genmoji and Object Remover, it’s not limited to only the latest iPhone models, which is a big plus from an end-user perspective.

Talking about privacy, your audio is processed right on your device so you shouldn’t worry about the privacy of your audio either. Though you can choose to share the audio with Apple in order to help the company enhance Vocal Shortcuts functionality.

To get started, go to the Settings app on your iPhone -> Accessibility -> Under Speech section, select Vocal Shortcuts.
After that, tap on Set Up Vocal Shortcuts and hit Continue.

Now, choose the preferred action and then set a custom phrase.
Note that you will need to verify your audio three times.

That’s pretty much it! I hope you have finally undershoot what “Vocal Shortcuts” are and why they can be pretty handy for you. Now that the clouds are out of the way, create a ton of cool shortcuts and use them to perform tasks more conveniently.