How To Set Up Your iPhone To Automatically Respond To Text Messages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can setup your iPhone to automatically reply to messages. 

An interesting and useful thing you can do with Shortcuts on your iPhone is to have it recognize when a new message arrives and then take an action. The action can be to respond to that person. So, your iPhone can respond on your behalf when it gets a new message. You don't even need to have your iPhone unlocked for this to happen.  

I'm going to show you here in iOS 26, but it works the same in iOS 18 as well. If you go into the Shortcuts App, you look along the bottom and you'll see Automation. Select that. That's what we want to create. An automation. Something that works automatically without us having to prompt it to run. Now we're going to use New Automation here and then we're going to look for the personal automation that responds to a message. 

Now we have several different parameters we need to fill-in for this. One is the Sender. We can have it run when Anybody sends us anything, or we can tap here and then choose a specific sender or a list of senders. I'm going to add just one right now. So I've added just this one person. This is only going to run when this one person sends us a message. I can tap the Checkmark there and I can also have it only run when the message contains something specific. So, for instance, if this was your spouse you can say if the message contains the text, Where are you, then you can respond with a message that gives your location. So you can tell them if you ever text me this then you'll get an automatic response. I'm just going to leave this blank so that any message sent by this person will invoke this specific shortcut. 

Now I'm going to have it run Immediately. So it is not going to have me confirm that it should reply. Now I'm going to choose next. Now I can choose a shortcut that I've already created or I can create a shortcut that is just part of this automation. That's what I'm going to do here. Now in the Actions here I'm going to look for the Action, Send Message. If you don't see it here just search for Send Message. Let's use that and I can put whatever message that I want right here. So for instance something like this. 

Now for the recipient I want to choose the same person that sent me the message. So that's easy enough to do. There I go. I can just add that. Now, I tap the Checkmark right there and now it is ready to go. So now look what happens here. If I open up the Messages App and I go to the conversation with that person, if they were to text me notice how it is going to respond automatically. They send a text. It appears and you can see that it automatically responded. This will happen even if the iPhone is locked.

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Now let's say you don't want to use this all the time. Only in special occasions. Well, if you return to the Automation's List here in Shortcuts, if you go into the Automation here you've got the Run Immediately option. You can also switch this to Don't Run. So now this is disabled. But you can always return to it later and say Run Immediately. So you can have a bunch of these for different purposes setup and Enable and Disable it as you like. 

Now what if you want to have this same Automation work for more than one person. Well, you can go to the When portion here and under Sender you can simply add more names. You can also just enter phone numbers here or email addresses for iMessage users. So I"ll add another one here and now there are two senders. The problem is the actual automation here responds to this person specifically. So how do you get it to respond to just the person that sent you the message. Well, I'm going to tap and hold right here and Clear it. Then tap and hold again, where it says Recipients, and add Shortcut Input here. This is going to take the Sender from the Shortcut Input and actually just respond to that one person. So while this will listen for messages from two people, it will only respond to the one the that actually sent you a message. 

Now let's say I wanted to do what I mentioned earlier and have it respond with a location. You can have it do all sorts of things like this. I'm going to add a New Automation here that when a specific sender sends me a message then if the message contains the text, Where are you, then it's going to run immediately and I'm going to create a shortcut here where it is going to get the current location. So I'm going to search for location here. Use that and then tap here and select Current Location. So this gets the current location.Then I'm going to search for text. I'm going to create some text right here. The text will have something I put in it, like this, and then right here on this next line I'm going to choose Location, like that. Then you can see it is going to prompt me here for what I want to include, like full street address, longitude, latitude, street, city. All of that. So you can select exactly what you want. Like I'll just say, city. Then I'm going to have it send a message. Then tap here so it is going to respond to the shortcut input, so the person that sent me the message, and it is going to use the text that's what it is going to send. So now when this person sends a regular text message it doesn't no anything, like that. But if they use the magic phrase here, you see it is going to respond with my message and it is going to put the location in there. 

If you experiment more with Shortcuts you'll see that you can use all sorts of logic in it, like using an if statement to check the time of day and only sending a message if it is between certain hours. Or maybe sending different messages if it is in the evening versus the morning. That kind of thing. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.