Introduction to the Home ETA Shortcut

What's up everybody, this is Steven Robles from Apple Insider. I'd love to hear from you, what shortcuts, how-to's or tips would you like to see here on the Apple Insider YouTube channel? Today, I'm going to teach you how to build another shortcut, one of my favorites probably because I use it the most often of any shortcut. I call it the Home ETA shortcut, and we'll rename it whatever you'd like, but what it does is get my current location, travel time driving to my home address, and it automatically populates a text to my wife with that information.

Building the Home ETA Shortcut

We'll start by renaming this shortcut. You can download it to your phone and run with that shortcut if you just want to click the link in the description of this video. However, I also want to show you how to build it, so here's how we build the Home ETA shortcut. The first thing you want to do is open the Shortcuts app on your iPhone or iPad again. You probably want to do this on your iPhone because that'll have your location most often when you're traveling or when you're outside the home.

To create a new shortcut, I'm going to hit the plus button here on the top right-hand corner of the screen. This is where you would put either your home address or your work address, and we can customize it later if needed. Now, let's start by entering our home address into the address field. You can type in the full address, or you can use the map view to select a location.

Now that we have our address entered, we need to add some steps to get our current location. To do this, we'll open up the "Get My Location" app. This will give us our current latitude and longitude, which we can then use in our shortcut.

Once we have our location, we can calculate our travel time using a mapping service like Google Maps or Waze. We'll choose one of these services and enter our starting point as our home address and the ending point as our destination, which will be set to "current location". This will give us an estimate of how long it will take us to get there.

Now that we have our travel time, we need to format this information into a text message. We can add some steps to display the travel time in hours and minutes, or we can format it as a percentage, such as "20% of your daily commute". We can also add some additional text to make the message more personalized.

Now that we have our text message formatted, we need to send it to our contact. To do this, we'll open up our contacts list and select the person we want to send the message to. We can choose from a list of pre-made messages or create a new one. In this case, we'll use a pre-made message.

Next, we'll add some steps to display the text message to our contact. We can do this by selecting the "Show" option in the shortcut and then choosing the message we created earlier. This will give us a preview of what the message will look like when it's sent.

Now that we have all the parts of our shortcut built, let's put them together. To do this, I'll hit the "Next" button here on the screen. This will bring up a new screen where we can title our shortcut and add any additional information we want to display. In this case, we'll call it "Going Home".

Adding Additional Features

One of the great things about Shortcuts is that you can customize your shortcut to fit your needs. To do this, I'll hit the "Show More" option here on the screen. This will bring up a new menu where we can add additional features to our shortcut.

One feature we might want to add is the ability to run the shortcut with Siri. To do this, we'll select the "Run with Siri" option from the menu. This will allow us to run the shortcut by simply asking Siri a specific phrase, such as "Going Home".

Now that we have all our features added, let's review our shortcut one last time. We can see that it displays our travel time in hours and minutes, along with some additional text to make the message more personalized.

Using the Shortcuts App

Now that we've built our shortcut, let's test it out. To do this, I'll hit the "Show More" option here on the screen. This will bring up a new menu where we can add additional steps to our shortcut. However, since we've already added all the necessary steps, there's not much else we can do.

To run our shortcut, we'll simply select it from our list of available shortcuts and hit the "Run" button here on the screen. This will bring up a new notification that displays our text message to our contact.

We can also use Siri to run our shortcut by saying the phrase "Going Home". When we say this phrase, the app will recognize our shortcut and send the message to our contact.

Conclusion

And that's it for today's tutorial on building the Home ETA shortcut. I hope you found this tutorial helpful, and I'd love to hear from you in the comments below. What other shortcuts, tips, and how-to's would you like to see here on the channel? If you liked this video, be sure to hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to our channel. We'll catch you next time!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody this is steven robles from apple insider you can follow me on twitter at steven robles i'd love to hear from you there what shortcuts how to's or tips would you like to see here on the apple insider youtube channel today i'm going to teach you how to build another shortcut and this is one of my favorites probably because i use it the most often of any shortcut i call it the home eta shortcut we'll rename it whatever you'd like but what it does is it gets my current location the travel time driving to my home address and it automatically populates a text to my wife with that information and so you can set this up to go to your home if you want to know what's my eta and travel time from current location to home or for work or you can have one for each i actually have one for home and for work and if i'm heading into work maybe i'm running in a little late that that shortcut will text my eta with in minutes to my boss or to a co-worker and then when i'm heading home maybe it's i'm heading home from work or i just picked up dinner at a takeout place and i want to let my wife know how far i am from home i just run the shortcut it automatically sends a text with my eta in minutes so here's how we build it it's really short if you just want to download it to your phone and run with that shortcut there's a link in the description of this video you can click that shortcut download it to your iphone or your ipad but probably want to do it on your iphone because that's the one that'll have your location most often when you're traveling or when you're outside the home and you can download the shortcut right there and use it right away but i also want to show you how to build it and so here's how you build the home eta shortcut so the first thing you want to do is open the shortcuts app on your iphone or ipad again you probably want to do this on your iphone because that'll have your location remember it looks like this s icon you can also search for it or download it for free in the app store we'll put a link to that in the youtube video description as well but i'll open shortcuts and to create a new shortcut i'm going to hit the plus button here on the top right now i'm going to add a new action and i'm actually going to search for street address that'll be the first action and i'll tap that here and this is where you would put either your home address or your work address wherever you want the shortcut to get travel time to so i'll pretend to put in an address here like 1 2 3 4 main street that's not my actual home address just so you know but you do that city state and postal code once you put in that street address hit the plus icon again and now you're going to search for get travel time it should be the only action that has that title and when i'm going to tap get travel time you'll see it adds this step and it will get driving time from the current location of this iphone to the street address that we put in above now you can actually customize this by tapping the driving word and maybe you actually walk home or take public transit or bike ride so you can actually change that option there and it will adjust the travel time to that form of transportation so if you actually take public transit home more often you can tap that i'm going to leave it on driving for now now the next step i'll hit the plus icon again and i'm actually going to search just for text i'm going to choose just a plain text box here and in this box this is actually the message that will send to the contact of our choice in the last step i typically like to have this text say be home in and this is where you actually use a magic variable you don't have to know what that means all you have to know is this little bar right here which is actually scrollable this horizontal bar i'm going to choose travel time and what this will do is the text that auto populates it will say be home in and use the travel time that it calculated in the step above now if you don't want travel time and actually you want to text what time you will be home you can change travel time to arrival time and say be home at and it'll just show the time i like to do travel time it does it in minutes and so the text will say be home in however many minutes and the final step of the shortcut hit the plus again and i'm going to search for send message and i'm going to choose the send message command and here we'll send the text that we populated above to a recipient of our choice and here you can tap recipients and search for anyone in your contacts partner significant other and once you've chosen that contact just one more step hit the show more option down here and this you can choose to show when run or toggle it off if you toggle it off it should send the text automatically without any action from you i'm going to keep it on because i do want to see how many minutes does it actually think it's going to take me to get home sometimes i actually have a little bit of a commute from work to home and this actually helps me see is there traffic going home because if that estimated travel time is a lot more than what i would typically expect then i could tell maybe there's traffic on my normal route and i want to go a different way so i like to see when this thing is run and then all i have to do is hit next and you can title the shortcut home eta or maybe going home we'll call it going home and you can also see that shortcuts is telling you you can actually run the shortcut by just asking siri so the next time you're headed home you can just hold the side button or say the magic words going home and it will run the shortcut automatically create the text and send it for you or show it to you and then it will send so now i've actually adjusted the shortcut with my home address and it's going to populate a text to myself just so i don't bombard my wife of text and you'll see when i run this shortcut it automatically opens the conversation of the contact i had chosen and you'll see the auto text is populated here be home in 17 minutes i can hit send and that's it again you can run this with siri also so i'll hold the side button for a minute and i'll say going home and there it actually runs the shortcut that is to my wife and it will send that text and i can hit send right there from the notification and that's it now whenever you're heading home from wherever you are you can send a text to your partner or significant other with your travel time automatically and they'll know when they can expect you home or at work again you can download this shortcut in the description of the video if you just want to click the link download it to your iphone and run it but this is how you can actually build it customize the address maybe change arrival time or distance too you can do all that in the shortcut we hope you found that useful let us know what other shortcuts tips and how-to's you'd like to see here on the channel again leave a comment down below i'd love to interact with you there if you liked the video hit the thumbs up button and don't forget to subscribe to the apple insider youtube channel hit the bell icon to get all the notifications so whenever there's a new video you won't miss any and don't forget to check out all the podcasts we have at apple insider the apple insider podcast i host that with other apple insider staff members that comes out every friday we cover the news some reviews tips and all that you can find that in the description as well homekit insider is myself and andrew o'hara we talk about homekit devices all things smart home that comes out every monday and apple insider daily you can get the top apple news headlines in just a few minutes monday through friday links to all those podcasts are in the description and to the shortcut that we learned today thanks for tuning in we'll catch you next time you\n"