Thanks to Siri AI and Shortcuts in iOS 27, I’ve finally created a better version of Shazam.

Shazam is great for identifying songs you hear in the wild, but not so great at revisiting them later. It requires either Apple Music or Spotify to play the songs in full, and there’s no way to add more context about what made you tag a song to begin with.

Now, I can press a button on my iPhone to make Shazam work the way I want: After identifying a song, it adds the name and artist to a “Shazam Tracks” page in Obsidian, includes a link to a free stream of that song on YouTube, and provides space for me to jot down where I was or what I was doing at the time.

None of this required any coding knowledge on my part. Instead, I just described my ideal Shazam setup in Apple’s Shortcuts app, and it assembled the whole thing for me.

Apple’s Shortcuts app has been around since 2018, letting you chain a series of actions into powerful routines. But while it’s a neat tool for power users, in the past it’s required a lot of tinkering with variables and if-then statements. The new “Describe a Shortcut” feature in iOS 27 makes the process much simpler, and it’s got me looking at iOS automation with some new energy.

To use Describe a Shortcut, you need an iPhone, iPad, or Mac that supports Siri AI:

You will also need iOS 27, iPadOS 27, or MacOS 27 Golden Gate, and will need to opt into the Siri AI beta under Settings > Siri.

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