I’ve just finished watching the WWDC presentation on Siri shortcuts. The best way to describe this is really as 2 distinct things: first, the simplified Workflow idea , which allows you to concatenate various commands into a macro (e.g., the sequence of things you want your phone to do when you tell it you’re heading home from work [text spouse, map route, start playlist, etc...]).
The second, and to me, more interesting part is the expansion of existing Siri intents (place VOIP call, order a ride, pay someone, etc...) to pretty much all apps, if they opt in. The opt-in can be as little as allowing actions in their app to be used as building blocks in personally created shortcuts (say, ordering a cheese pizza from a local pizzeria’s app and adding that your drive home actions). Or app developers can allow Siri to start picking up patterns in your app usage and offering those actions up when it predicts you might want to use them again. For example, I frequently am driving at 8am on Tuesday mornings and stop at a particular Starbucks along my route and order the same thing. If Starbucks opts into this, after a few weeks of seeing my activity, the Starbucks app may spontaneously offer up a Siri suggestion to place my preferred order. I tap yes and that’s it. Order placed.
Other possibilities are media playback. On my drive, I almost always listen to the Podcast app. That may be surfaced as a suggestion as well.
If I change my weekly routine to driving on different days, but still want my coffee and podcast, I could then just use the Shortcuts app to build my own “driving” routine with those 2 actions built in.