in this video we want to build a shortcut to search your contacts with birthdays matching the current date and if it happens to find something it's going to send a birthday message on your behalf and then we can turn it into an automation that will run completely independently at any given time of the day and as a bonus I will show you how you can send the message via WhatsApp instead of iMessage if you have friends and family that are not within the iMessage ecosystem so for this to work you need to have an iPhone or an iPad device then you need the shortcuts app on your iphone/ipad and you need the birthday details for your contacts to be saved as a contact detail which basically means it wouldn't work if your birthdays are saved in calendar as all day events at least not with this shortcut maybe we can talk in the comments if you want more details on how to develop something for that with that out of the way let's get started so open the shortcuts app let me turn off stage manager so you only see the one window that I have over here so open the shortcuts app and click on the plus icon on the top right to create a new shortcut before we even get started let's give the shortcut a name we're going to call it birthday messages birthday messages and now we can start adding our actions so the first action we need is find contacts we need to identify the contacts whose birthday matches the current date within all contacts we're going to add a filter and the filter is going to be birthday by default it gives you a calendar to select between the dates you don't have to do any of that just long tap this thing and select current date so I've created a fake contact whose birthday is today's date so that's going to show up when I run this shortcut using the play icon on the top right you can see the fake name contact card has been pulled up next we need an action to pull the phone number from this contact for that we're going to use an action called get details of contact now we want the phone number so we're going to select that from this list where is that where's that that right here so when I run the shortcut again you can see it will pull up the phone number stored in the contact details so in this case there's only one fake contact that matches today's birthday but in your contact list there could be multiple people that share a birthday so we need to make sure that the birthday messages are sent to each one of the person and they're not sent as a group message instead it's sent individually to each one of those people and for that to work we need an action called repeat with each we can bring a send message action right within our repeat with each action by default it select a repeat item we're not going to do that we're going to clear that variable we're going to type out our message in my case I'm just going to say happy birthday I like to be very simple with this but you can you can give it as detailed of a birthday message as you want we're going to Long tap on recipients and we're going to select the repeat item and if I run this action right now it will try to send a message to the contact that I have in there I don't want to mess with that cuz I don't know if that's a real phone number or not and if sending the iMessage or a oldfashioned green bubble text as a birthday message is all you wanted to do you're good to go you can jump to the automation section of this video but if you want to send a WhatsApp message we need to jump to the iPhones real quickly instead of searching for the actions just go to the apps Tab and scroll down to Whatsapp here you can see there is a WhatsApp send message action so that's a send message action that will send a message through WhatsApp we're going to bring that into our repeat Loop and we're going to do the same thing we did for the iMessage option so we're going to remove repeat item and we're going to say happy birthday and we want to select the repeat item in the recipient portion of this action now if I were to run the shortcut it would basically send a WhatsApp message instead of sending a regular IM message so that's how you modify the shortcut to sending a WhatsApp message instead but what really makes the shortcut remarkable is the ability to run it automatically so let's jump back to the iPad and make it into an automation that runs automatically completely independent of you I like my birthday messages to be sent out early in the morning and I don't want to be involved in the process so it happens before I even wake up so let's start an automation by going to the automation tab on the shortcuts app you can click the plus icon in the top left this time and select time of day as you trigger in this case we're going to select 6: a.m. I want to do it daily and we want to select run immediately this is an important step because if you do not select that it will just send you notification and never send a message no matter what happens we're going to click next here you need to select what shortcut needs to run when the automation triggers so we called it birthday messages and if you were following along with me at 6:00 a.m. every morning a birthday message will be sent out from you your iPad or your iPhone if your contacts happen to have a birthday for that given day well that's all I have for you today thank you everybody for watching and if this video helped you in any way possible please hit the like button please leave the number 64 in the comment section for me to be able to identify you if you're still watching this video