Your smartphone can automatically congratulate friends on their birthday: how to set it up

Who among us has never forgotten to wish a friend or family member a happy birthday? Your iPhone can help you - you can set up automatic greetings, reports Lifehacker.

Photo: IStock

Apple doesn't have a built-in feature to automatically send messages related to birthdays or anything else. Instead, you can use the powerful but under-popular “automation” Shortcuts.

How to Customize Birthday Messages on iPhone

To start, automation relies on data you provide in the Contacts app. You open this app and add birthdays to any contact you want to send an annual birthday wish to.

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Then open Shortcuts and add the Birthday Today shortcut to the app. You can run the shortcut manually every day (if you think you won't forget about it) and it will automatically send a congratulations message to the relevant people. To customize your birthday message, tap the three dots in the top right corner of the shortcut's thumbnail. Find the "Send" block, then edit the message inside. Click Done when you're ready.

Automate birthday messages

If you don't want to run a shortcut every day, you can automate the process: Open the Shortcuts app, tap Automation at the bottom, tap the + icon in the top right corner, and select Create Personal Automation.

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Now select Time of Day and set the time when you want to send text messages. If you want to be one of the first to send a message to every person, you can schedule it for midnight. If you prefer to keep things more casual, schedule a time around mid-morning. In the Repeat section, make sure you select Daily. This will force the automation to run once per day. Click Next.

On the next page, select the Apps tab and find Shortcuts, then click Open Shortcuts. Click the button next to Open and select Birthday Today from the list of shortcuts. Click Next again.

In the last step, disable Ask Before Running and click Done. That's all! Your iPhone will automatically send birthday wishes to the people in your contacts.

Continue browsing your contacts

Of course, the problem with automation is that you may end up contacting people you wouldn't want to talk to. Your automation can't determine whether a certain contact is active or someone you're no longer in touch with. This is why you should periodically review and delete unnecessary contacts or simply delete the birthdays of those you don't want to contact.

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And while you would manually add birthday information for your contacts in most cases, keep in mind that if someone shared a contact with you, they may have added a birthday, and you could also accidentally send that person happy birthday wishes .

You may also want to change the greeting you send from time to time. A little tweaking once a year will make it less obvious that you're just copying the same text over and over again.

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