Add item to shopping list using Siri on AppleWatch

Hi

I use event actions made in the phone app to trigger automations from my Apple Watch. I would really like to be able to use Siri on my watch to add items to my shopping list. I can’t find anything about this in docs or here in the forums.

Is this possible and, if so, how?

Yes, this is possible using the Shortcuts app (bundled by default on iOS 13+). In fact I made this exact shortcut earlier :slight_smile:

I plan to add this and numerous other pre-made Shortcut examples to the docs in a few weeks after iOS 14 leaves beta. But for now, here’s the steps to recreate it.

You could either tap this Shortcut on your Apple Watch (I think it only exists on iOS 14) or call it using Siri. If you name the Shortcut “Add to shopping list” for example, you’d raise your wrist and say “Hey Siri, add to shopping list.”

Then it’ll ask you to dictate text, just say the item name like “Pizza.” It’ll add to your HA shopping list and Siri will respond with a confirmation (“Added Pizza to your list.”)

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There’s also some built in things we can do to support Shopping Lists better (GitHub issues, feel free to emoji 'em):

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Thank you! I tried this and almost got it working :slight_smile:

I get this after adding “Potatoe”:

“OK, done. Sending ${eventName} to Home Assistant was successful” (sounds a bit weird :slight_smile:)
“Added Potatoe to Shopping List”

But nothing shows up in the Shopping List in HA.

I get the feeling that I need to configure something here.
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Is it enough to just write the shopping_list.add_item in the “Call with data”-sequence, or do I have to create an action or service somewhere before I can use it?

When listening for event ios.action_fired in Developer tools nothing shows up.

I think you may have used the wrong action inside your Shortcut (I suspect you chose “Fire Event” when it should be “Call Service”). But without seeing all the actions of your Shortcut, I’m not really sure.

Shortcuts has also changed significantly from iOS 13 to iOS 14, and I’m also on the TestFlight (beta) build of the iOS app, so that’s why I was holding off on sharing a link to it. Was waiting for all those things to have an official stable release first.

But if you want to try mine, I just put it up on iCloud. iCloud Link. Open that link in Safari on your iOS device and it should allow you to import it to Shortcuts, and it should (hopefully) work as-is. You might have to go into the iOS Settings app -> Shortcuts -> Allow Untrusted Shortcuts and toggle that on first.

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Wow! You’re absolutely correct! :slight_smile:

Because I use my iPhone in Norwegian, with translation that can be confusing, I chose the wrong action just like you were thinking.

Changed it to call service (utfør tjeneste in norwegian) and it worked instantly :slight_smile:

And when choosing the right action I also got to pick the service shopping_list.add_item from a list instead of writing it.

Now it updates my shopping list :slight_smile:

Thanks for sharing iCloud-link (that I didn’t need :slight_smile:) and for taking time to help me with great detail!

By the way: Is there a way to make Siri ask me something else than “What should stringAnswer be?”

Glad you got it all sorted out!

You can’t write a customized Siri message there unfortunately, that is set by Apple. But what you can do is change the language to something else. On that action you will see a “Show More” line that you can expand to change the language, like this:

In English US, Siri asks me “What text?” rather than “What should stringAnswer be?”

I don’t know Norwegian, but to be me, that kind of sounds like a translation error on Apple’s side. If so you could report the bug to them via http://feedbackassistant.apple.com/

Hi

Tested changing language, but not helping. Seems like it’s a bug, or at least it should be :slight_smile:

So I reported it as a bug.

They should at least make it possible to set it to silent (disable Siri response) as a feature, but I don’t see why they won’t add the possibility to define this response when I can define a later response.

Anyway, thank you so much for taking time helping me! This has been a great lesson for me. Now I will play around with other shortcuts and I’ll have lots of fun with more or less useless commands :slight_smile:

This used to work for me, but now Siri just says “I don’t see a shopping list, want me to make one?” How can I fix this?