Trigger Siri shortcut from HA

[afraz]

@digitone

There is no direct way but a workaround.
To run personal automations in shortcuts on iOS:

Create a dummy switch in home assistant (or dummy powerstrip if you want to run more shortcuts) and add it to your HomeKit bridge.

Have an automation in home assistant be triggered by the changed state of the previously named switch and then have the same automation send an email with a specific subject using SMTP integration from home assistant.

In shortcuts create a personal automation that checks your email for a new email from a certain sender with a certain subject and then have it run any shortcut you’d like.

Lets come back to this. And also remember the problem back then:

@zacwest

Executing a shortcut requires launching the Shortcuts app which cannot be done in the background.

In addition it wasn‘t possible to run automations based on email triggers without clicking on its run notification.

I don’t know when exactly Apple has implemented this but I‘m on iOS 17.2.1 and it now allows me to trigger any shortcut using specific email subjects IN THE BACKGROUND.

Since I use n8n to trigger my systems, this is my workflow:

I trigger a n8n workflow using a webhook. n8n then sends an email to my icloud email account. As soon as the email arrives on my iPhone (usually within a few seconds) the email based automation gets triggered and executes the target iOS shortcut.

No interaction required. Just turn off the email notifications for the trigger messages and regularly auto-clean the inbox. Keep in mind to use an email account type that allows fetching via „push“ to ensure near-realtime triggering. In my case I just used my icloud email account since it doesn‘t serve a purpose anyway.

Happy automating.