In previous versions of iOS, you have been able to create automations in the Home application. They enabled you to, for instance, have lights turn on when you arrive home. iOS 13.1 now brings this sort of automation to your iOS devices via Personal Automations.

Personal Automations let you do things like start playing a particular play-list whenever you open a certain application, dim the screen brightness when Low Power Mode turns on, or turn off your cellular data connection when you connect to your home Wi-Fi network.

To find out for yourself what you can do with personal automations, open the Shortcuts application (now built into iOS 13) and tap the Automation tab.

The routine

This simple routine – triggered automatically when you stop the morning alarm – consist in the following: gather and speak the relevant information for you (current date, current weather, time to drive to work, phone battery level, next calendar events, etc.), turn on the living room lamps and start playing your favourite internet radio station.

For the simplicity sake let’s separate this routine in two Shortcuts: Rise & Shine (to cover the first part of the routine) and Play My Favourite Radio for the second part.

Here is an example for a day with some events in the calendar (the textual representation and the corresponding audio message):

Good morning, MyName! Today is Today. The weather now is Weather Conditions (Condition) with a high of Weather Conditions (High) and a low of Weather Conditions (Low). It will take you Travel Time to drive to work. Phone battery is at Battery Level%. Your next events are: MyEvents. Have a wonderful day!

Rise & Shine

Let’s begin with Good morning, MyName!. As an experiment (and for narcissistic psychological reasons), let’s get your nickname from the Contacts list and add it to the MyName variable. Like this, if in the future you decide that a more appropriate name will be, I don’t know, perhaps All-Mighty, you will just update the nickname in the contact card and the Shortcut will compliment you accordingly. Of course, you can skip this part and simply use something like Good morning, Boss!, but where is the fun in that?

Next phrase is Today is Today. This was a bit tricky. Since we want first the day of the week (e.g.: Monday) and then the current date – without the time – we need to use a custom format for the Current Date and add first the day of the week to the Today variable.

Then we add the rest of the date (without the time) to the same Today variable.

All of this, got us the following phrase: Today is Saturday, 19th of October 2019. Neat!

Getting the current weather is pretty straight forward via the Weather application. Then is just a matter of extracting various information from the current weather (see below) and put them in a meaningful sentence like The weather now is Weather Conditions (Condition) with a high of Weather Conditions (High) and a low of Weather Conditions (Low).

Next, to get the travel time to work, first we add a Street Address using the Maps application to the variable Work Address, and then you can get the travel time from the Current Location to the work address via the same application.

Getting the phone battery level is also just a simple step and the related text even simpler: Phone battery is at Battery Level%.

Your next events are: MyEvents is a bit complex. We will use a simple IF scripting condition and an iteration (!). Bear with me, it sounds more complicated than it is. First, we get the next 3 calendar events that are scheduled in the next 8 hours.

Then, if the number of events is greater than zero, we iterate each event (the Repeat part), extract the start date-time, the name of the event and the event’s location into a Text and add the entire thing to the My Events variable.

Next, since we have finished collecting all the data, we will build the final text that will be played by Siri in case there are some events for the day

If there are no events today (the Otherwise part), we just need to build a simpler text that will be played by Siri in a non-events day scenario.

Last, since we have covered both cases (events or not so eventful day) we instruct Siri to play the entire resulting text.

As an optional part, we can turn on the Philips Hue living room lamps so the motivation to wake up will hopefully increase.

Play My Favourite Radio

This is the simple shortcut: the URL of the on-line radio station is passed to the Safari Web Browser. That’s it.

If you do not unlock the phone after dismissing the alarm, this shortcut will fail. Fore security reasons, iOS does not allow launching Safari while the phone is still locked.

Putting it all together

To put these two Shortcuts to work, we create a personal automation that will be triggered when the morning alarm is stopped (don’t worry, you can still snooze it).

Open Shortcuts application, go to Automation tab, tap on the + sign, select Create Personal Automation, under Events select Alarm, then select Is Stopped and the desired alarm.

Tap on Next and add two times the Run Shortcut action, one for Rise & Shine shortcut and one for the Play My Favourite Radio.

That will be all. Next morning, when you will stop the alarm, Siri will tell you, in a nice voice, the daily summary, will turn on the lights and play your favourite radio, no more reason to snooze or procrastinate and a higher motivation to wake up and be the best version of yourself.