iPhone Shortcuts

Wrist Assistant adds a set of actions to the iPhone Shortcuts app, so you can build your own shortcuts and time- or location-based automations that run straight from your phone — no watch required.

These are the same controls you use on the wrist, now available as Shortcuts steps. Run them by tapping a shortcut, asking Siri, or letting an Automation fire them (when you arrive home, at sunset, on a schedule, and so on).

The Actions

Search (Wrist Assistant) in any Shortcuts action picker to see them all.

Control Entity

One action for controlling everything. Pick a Home Assistant entity, and the Action picker adapts to that entity’s type:

A light offers Turn On, Turn Off, Toggle, and Set Brightness.
A lock offers Lock and Unlock.
A cover offers Open, Close, Stop, and Set Position.
A media player offers Play / Pause, Play, Pause, Next Track, Previous Track.
A climate entity offers Set Temperature, Set Mode, Turn On, Turn Off.
switches, fans, scenes, scripts, automations, buttons, and more each get their own fitting actions.

Value fields appear only for the matching action — a Brightness field for Set Brightness, Position for Set Position, Temperature for Set Temperature, Speed for a fan, Mode for a thermostat. Pick a plain action like Toggle and no extra fields show.

Actions a specific device can’t do are hidden automatically: a non-dimmable light won’t offer Set Brightness, a position-less blind won’t offer Set Position, a media player without next/previous won’t offer skip. Read-only things — sensors, device trackers, weather, the sun — don’t appear in the entity picker at all; use Get Entity State for those.

Get Entity State

Pick any entity and get its current state back as a value — on, 23.5, home, playing, whatever Home Assistant reports. Use it to branch a shortcut (“if the door is open, send me a notification”) or read it aloud. This one lists every entity, including read-only sensors.

Get Camera Image

Pick a camera and fetch a still JPEG snapshot. The image is returned as a value, so you can chain it into the next step — save it to Photos, attach it to a message, run it through another action. Turn on Show Image (on by default) to also display the snapshot on screen when the shortcut runs; turn it off for a silent, chain-only grab. Available on both iPhone and Apple Watch.

Add to List

Add an item to a Home Assistant to-do list. Type the item text and pick the target list as Shortcuts parameters, and it’s added directly — handy for “add milk to the shopping list” automations.

Run HTTP Action

Fire a request from your HTTP Actions library. The action returns the extracted reply value, so a shortcut can chain the result into its next step. See HTTP Actions → Siri & Shortcuts for details.

Show Status Page

Show one of your configured status pages — a custom snapshot of live entity states — as a result card when the shortcut runs.

Siri vs. Shortcuts

There are two ways to reach Wrist Assistant by voice and automation, and they live on different devices:

Spoken Siri phrases are watch-side. “Toggle the porch light with Wrist Assistant”, “Lock the front door with Wrist Assistant”, and the rest are built-in phrases provided by the watch app. See Siri Shortcuts for the full list.
On iPhone, these are manual Shortcuts actions. The actions above are buildable steps you add yourself in the Shortcuts app — there are no automatic spoken phrases for them on the phone. This is by design: it keeps the phone actions specific and predictable, and it avoids hijacking the Home Assistant companion app’s voice commands.

You can still trigger any shortcut you build by voice (“Hey Siri, [your shortcut name]”) or from an Automation — the difference is that you name and wire them up, rather than the app pre-registering phrases.