Universal Siri Shortcuts v2 - HomeKit away from home, without Apple TV/iPad

EDIT: V2 now available - see below


Hi everyone!

Thought I would share this as haven’t seen much in the way of Siri Shortcut projects now that @robbiet480 has released the new iOS companion app and others may find these of use.

If you’re using the new app and are running iOS 13, you should be able to just download these shortcuts straight from the links and get going immediately!

At home I expose my devices through Homekit but I don’t own an Apple TV or iPad to act as a home hub so I can’t invoke devices with Siri away from home - these shortcuts fix this problem!

I have made three shortcuts so far - one for turning on devices, one for turning off devices, and one for checking the status of a device or sensor.

Once installed, all you need to do is edit the Dictionary for each shortcut, replacing the values with the entity ids of all the devices you want to control, and the name you want to use for each with Siri.

Siri shortcuts are case-sensitive - therefore it is essential that you capitalise the first letter of the device and use lowercase for the rest of the device name, otherwise you may find the shortcut doesn’t work properly - for example, “Kitchen lights” is fine, whereas “Kitchen Lights” may not work.

The ‘check device’ shortcut should identify plural devices and refer to them as ‘is’ or ‘are’ appropriately. Sensors should be reported with their units of measurement. I have also tweaked the way it reports alarm status - ‘armed_away’ should be reported as just ‘armed’.

These are just a first attempt and any refinements or improvements you can suggest, or would like to see, would be welcomed!

Thanks again to @robbiet480 for making all this possible.

"Hey Siri, check device": deleted - see v2

"Hey Siri, turn on device": deleted - see v2

"Hey Siri, turn off device": deleted - see v2

Things to improve:
Better handling of upper/lowercase text, possibly with regex
Improved feedback to verify that action has been completed succesfully
Expansion to better handle a wider variety of devices

3 Likes

Hi,

Going to test hem right now. Will report back in a couple minutes.

Edit: jep works great. Needed a little translation to dutch but after that it works!

How do you edit the entries for the dictionary? On your phone?

Unfortunately for now it’s phone editing only! Glad you got it working though.

More improvements to come. Watch this space!

1 Like

V2 now available! New features:

  • Easy setup - just add your HA URL and long-lived access token as variables at the start of each shortcut!

  • Automatically works with all your devices: The shortcuts have been reworked to be compatible with all your devices without having to manually insert entity_ids! When you run a shortcut it will ask you for the name of the device - it will then search for a device in your HA setup that has the same Friendly Name and automatically pick out the correct Entity ID. If you have more than one device with the same Friendly Name, it will let you select the correct one.

  • Error reporting and debugging: If an error occurs when connecting to HA, the shortcut will read out the error code to help you diagnose the problem.

I have tested these shortcuts on iOS 13 and iOS 14 with HA 0.114 and 0.115 - please let me know if you are having problems with setup.

"Hey Siri, check device": https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/c72ca4c6968e4c2194ee22c81f2e6bf4

"Hey Siri, turn on device": https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/f7a70f3c58554f9e87e9e1f02b912e13

"Hey Siri, turn off device": https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/59f87373fe8c466ea586b8e5c681b937