IFTTT, WhatsApp, and my obsession with automations

I try to automate every repetitive task I come across, not just in Home Automation, although that’s where I have the most actions automated and set with conditions so they only trigger at certain moments… and the other day the folks at IFTTT announced that I can now integrate different services with WhatsApp, and that made my head explode with ideas. Let me tell you a bit more about it.

Introducing the Problem

The truth is it really bugs me having to do certain repetitive actions over and over again in my daily life, or whenever certain conditions arise. The same thing happens to me at work—imagine I occasionally receive a document that I need to review and store in a specific shared folder… so what I came up with is capturing the event of receiving that document so it gets automatically stored in a folder. It’s true I can’t automate the actual reviewing of the document, but at least I get rid of the administrative part of copying it between folders and so on. At work I have a thousand automations, usually built with Microsoft’s Power Automate since we use the Microsoft Office 365 suite there.

Mirrored Calendars

Another thing I have automated is calendar management, since I have 2 calendars… on one hand I have my corporate work calendar where I’ve got the gazillion meetings I have every single day and the half-finished tasks I’m juggling, and on the other hand I have my private iCloud calendar where I put my personal events, family reminders, and of course the Home Automation Consultations I do with you all. What used to happen is that sometimes I’d have a Home Automation Consultation or a dentist appointment properly blocked off on my calendar, but it wasn’t showing up on my corporate calendar, so sometimes I’d get a meeting scheduled at that exact time and I’d have to move the event. For a while what I was doing was copying the time slot between calendars—that is, if I had a home automation consultation from 5 to 6 pm, I’d copy that same slot into my corporate calendar so nobody would schedule a meeting for me at that specific time. Needless to say, it didn’t take long before I automated this copying process, because otherwise, every time someone scheduled a meeting for me at work, I had to go to my iCloud calendar and copy it over… and vice versa, of course. What a hassle. What I did was integrate my iCloud calendar into Outlook (yeah, yeah, I know, I’m a huge fan of Apple’s Mail app… but it’s fallen behind in some areas, no Apple Intelligence or anything, and after a few months with the paid version of Spark, I realized that for a Microsoft-based work environment, there’s nothing better than Outlook). Anyway, after integrating the iCloud calendar into Outlook, I created a Power Automate rule so that whenever there’s a new event in one calendar, it gets copied to the other one. In 10 or 15 minutes I forgot about a task I used to have to repeat several times a day.

Automating My Training

Outside of work I also have things automated with other services, not just my social media management, which I’ll tell you about in a bit. For example, as you know, I go running every morning—I’m training to run the Valencia Marathon for another year, which now takes place in December. Anyway, in the mornings I’d go running either with my Garmin or my Apple Watch, and then I’d send the file they generated to my coach so he could review my progress and give me advice on how to approach the following training sessions for the week. It wasn’t a big deal—in a few seconds I could export the file using an app called HealthFit in the case of the Apple Watch, or Garmin’s own export tool when I ran with the Fenix, and I’d send it to my coach via WhatsApp… and then he’d give me his feedback and I’d adjust the following sessions accordingly. Well, that’s no longer necessary—there are now some services that sync this information between platforms, so my coach connects to the FinalSurge platform and there he can review all my training data and adjust the upcoming sessions on the calendar to match my fitness level… and I don’t even have to worry about what I’m supposed to do that day! When I get up and head down to the street, I just have to tell my watch I want to go for a run, and it tells me ‘Well, according to your coach, today you’re doing the following,’ and completely hands-off, I know exactly what I need to do. As for social media, everything’s already figured out too. I use the Zapier service to share information and schedule certain posts. For example, I know that blog posts get more readers on Tuesday mornings. However, I publish the podcast on Thursday or Friday because it gets more listens than if I published it on Tuesdays—I imagine because we have more free time to tinker around during the weekend. Plus, I’m very much a Friday and weekend kind of guy, so I’d publish it on those days anyway! Anyway, with Zapier I have it automated so that when a new article gets published on the blog, a short excerpt is generated and posted on Twitter or X along with the link, also on Mastodon (this integration was anything but easy), on my LinkedIn profile, in the Domótica Compatible Telegram group… and the same goes for the YouTube videos. I don’t do this with the Podcast because those of you who listen to the podcast are already subscribed, so I don’t want to be annoying by posting it everywhere. Between Zapier and the famous IFTTT platform, I’ve got all these publishing and scheduling needs more than covered without lifting a finger. Okay okay okay, with the ChatGPT API I already told you about when I mentioned chatting with Jarvis through Home Assistant to ask for things around the House (you have this blog post and this podcast episode) I’ve set it up so that whenever I publish a new article on the blog, it gets translated into English and left ready in case I want to publish the English version too. But you can also do it with voice! You can record it in Spanish or feed the text to the AI so it translates it and publishes it as audio, either with the AI’s own voice or with your own voice. There’s a voice-learning process where you read sentences from Don Quixote and it gradually learns your voice. It’s true that it’s not exactly your voice—it sounds a bit lifeless, missing some passion—but even so your brain still trips out because you go ‘wait, that’s me… but I don’t remember ever saying this,’ and you end up with this weird conflict between the neurons in your brain that are hearing you but can’t place the memory. Totally wild stuff. Wow, with the huge introduction I just dumped on you, I get the feeling that what I actually wanted to tell you is going to seem pretty thin now! What a mess.

The Solution?: IFTTT

I’m subscribed to IFTTT and pay for the Pro plan. I think it’s dirt cheap, but a while back I was listening to Victor Correal, the founder of GuideDoc, which is like the Netflix of documentaries… and Victor said he had several free IFTTT accounts to cover all his needs and have more automations than a single free plan allows. Now, it’s true Victor is Catalan and every penny counts, but I’m telling you for real, IFTTT is dirt cheap—I pay less than €5 a month. Anyway, the folks at IFTTT released a WhatsApp connector the other day that, through a bot, lets you integrate other apps and events with WhatsApp so it can notify you. Yeah, I know, I know, you can already integrate Home Assistant with a Telegram bot—I actually had that running for a while too, so instead of getting push notifications through the Home Assistant app, they’d come in as messages from a Telegram bot. It was kind of neat but not very useful in my day-to-day life since I already had those same notifications in the Home Assistant app. It can be handy if you use Telegram a lot and don’t want to keep the Home Assistant app open all the time, I don’t know… some people use Telegram as a work tool and have all their conversations and groups there… but honestly, in Spain people are more into WhatsApp. Telegram has more limited use, usually among total nerds like us into some specific topic… not to mention Discord, that’s a whole different story—but the resistance people like my parents have to installing Telegram or Discord is very high, whereas with WhatsApp they feel much more comfortable and use it for all sorts of things.

Too Many Notifications Make a Lot of Noise

Now, let’s not go overboard either, because oftentimes we end up automating unnecessary nonsense. Talking about this very thing with a coworker this morning, he asked me if you could get the weather forecast on WhatsApp… and I said ‘Well, you sure can… but it seems kind of pointless to me… to see that message you’re going to grab your phone or your smartwatch anyway, and there’s the weather forecast right there.’ And still, if what you want is to avoid getting soaked if it’s going to rain, you can do more fun things, like having the bathroom lights turn blue when you walk in to brush your teeth in the morning if it’s going to rain that day, so you already know to grab an umbrella. I actually had that automation running for a while… but the interesting part is that it’s completely hands-off—you don’t even have to check the weather or read a WhatsApp message. But setting aside the obvious stuff, we could, for example, get a WhatsApp message whenever someone rings the doorbell at home if we have a Ring Intercom. Well… actually, we can’t, and finding that out really annoyed me. The Ring Intercom isn’t listed on the Ring.com website, which is what the IFTTT connector links to. There you can see other Ring devices you might have… but not the Intercom, not yet anyway. I already complained yesterday to both Ring and IFTTT about misleading advertising. But then again… what would we even want this for? Sure, my wife would get a WhatsApp message if someone rings the building’s doorbell… but she wouldn’t be able to interact with whoever’s there or open the door, it’s just a plain notification. It doesn’t add anything for me at all. The same connector allows for some things that might be more interesting. It integrates with Sonos and its family of speakers, so we can start playback on our Sonos speakers from WhatsApp. Eh, fine, I guess we’ll take what we can get. It integrates with iRobot too, so we can turn on the Roomba with a WhatsApp message… if your vacuum isn’t compatible with HomeKit, that could be handy, but in my case I have an automation that launches the vacuum under certain conditions, and when it’s done, it sends me a notification with a map of what it vacuumed. There’s another integration that could be interesting if you don’t have Home Assistant, which is that you can get a WhatsApp message when someone in your family or friend group enters a specific geographic area. For that they need to have the IFTTT app installed on their phone with location access enabled, of course. But hey, if you want to avoid your kid catching you naked at home because they got out of school early, that could come in handy. Anyway, as you can see, the limit is once again your imagination… but you shouldn’t go crazy with notifications, whether through IFTTT and WhatsApp, or the Home app, or Home Assistant, or wherever, because eventually we’ll get overloaded and end up ignoring them. Personally, I’d rather have the house act on its own—have the lights turn on at dusk only if someone’s home. Have the boiler kick in when the house gets too cold, or if I’m on my way to my apartment in Valencia, have the water heater’s smart plug turn on so I can take a shower when I arrive. All of that handled hands-off, without needing to send me notifications unless something goes wrong—let’s not end up like Homer in that Simpsons episode where an alarm is blaring at the nuclear plant where he works, and Homer shouts ‘THIS ALARM SOUNDS WHEN EVERYTHING IS FINE’