While there are plenty of ways to find out the exact battery life left on your iPhone, you can take all the work off of it by having the iPhone verbally tell you the current percentage every time you start or stop charging. This trick works best whether you use wired or wireless chargers.
Most of the time, you can see your iPhone’s battery level pop up on the screen whenever you start or finish charging, but it comes and goes before you even realize it. With custom automation, you can get voice confirmation of your iPhone’s current battery level so you never have to worry about manually finding it.
Follow the instructions below to get started. If you’d rather set up automatic charging actions than charge in another way, here are a few other things you can do on your iPhone:
- Play sound or song when plugged in or unplugged
- Notify you when it reaches 100% full battery
- Say whatever you want when plugging in your charger
- Warn you whenever there is only 5% battery remaining
Building Shortcut Automation
First, open the Shortcuts app. You can reinstall it from the App Store if you uninstalled it. I’m using iOS 16 in this guide, but it will also work on iOS 14 and 15. And in case you’re wondering, it will also work on iPad models running iPadOS 14-16 – the process is the same.
Step 1: Choose Your Triggers
On the Automation tab, tap the plus sign (+), select Create Personal Automation, and select the Charger trigger. Then choose Connected and Disconnected if you want Siri to tell you the battery level when you start charging your iPhone and when you stop. You can do both if that suits you better.
Click “Next”to start creating the actual workflow to automate.
Step 2: Add a Get Battery Level Action
For an automation workflow, click “Add Action”or the search bar at the bottom, then find and select “Get Battery Status”or “Get Battery Level”.
You’ll see “Get Battery Status”in iOS 16.2 and later, and “Get Battery Level”in iOS 16.1.2 and earlier. These are the same steps, only the newer version of iOS 16.2 allows you to toggle “Battery level”to “Charging”or “Connected to charger”which we don’t have to do.
Step 3: Add a Speak Text action.
Click on the search bar, find and select the second action “Speak text”. If you stop here, Siri will only tell you the battery level as a number. For example, if it’s 46%, Siri will say “46”instead; To change this, see Step 4.
Step 4Customize What Siri Says (Optional)
You can add more to what Siri says if you like. Going back to the 46% example, I want my iPhone to say “My current battery level is 46%.”
To do this, click in the field after “Speak”to place the cursor before “Battery Status”or “Battery Level”, then enter what you want. For me it’s “My current battery level”. Then move the cursor after “Battery Status”or “Battery Level”and add the rest. For me, it’s just a percentage.
Step 5Customize How Siri Says It (Optional)
If you haven’t already, tap the chevron in the Speak Text action box to display more options. You can disable “Wait to complete”in the advanced menu if you wish. It doesn’t matter if it’s enabled or disabled for this automation, because the result is the same. You can also adjust the speed and pitch of Siri’s voice, change the language of the conversation, and even choose a different voice.
Step 6Disable “Ask”and Save Your Automation
Click “Next”after setting up how Siri will speak the text, then disable “Ask before launch”on the next page. At the prompt, tap Don’t Ask to make this a real automation, not one that asks you if you want Siri to talk about your battery level or not. Click “Finish”and you’re done.
Step 7: Test and Troubleshoot
Now all you have to do is test your new automation. Plug your iPhone into a power source or place it on a wireless charger, and in about a second, Siri will speak whatever you have programmed. Unplug your iPhone or remove it from the wireless charger and Siri will notify you of the new level. If this doesn’t work properly, here are some common troubleshooting issues:
1. If you can’t hear Siri
If you can’t hear Siri talking, you may need to turn up the Siri volume on your device. You can do this in one of two ways. First, you can ask Siri to “speak up”. Second, you can activate Siri like you normally would, then use the volume buttons on the side of your device while it’s talking to turn up the volume. Siri should then remember your volume preferences for conversational interactions.
Shortcuts doesn’t have actions to adjust the Siri volume, but maybe one day…if we’re lucky.
2. If he says a fractional number
Sometimes Siri can speak the volume level as a fractional number. For example, “41.38495873”instead of “41”. I’ve only come across this a few times, but you can set the automation to tell Siri only the rounded numbers if that’s annoying enough.
To do this, place the Rounded Number action between the Get Battery Level and Speak Text actions. Then click on “Battery Status”or “Battery Level”in the “Speak Text”input field and click on “Clear Variable”. After it disappears, place the cursor where it was and select the “Rounded Number”suggestion above the keyboard. Save the changes and it will stop producing fractional numbers.
