I was sick of spam calls so I made this iPhone shortcut to help

• Googling Spam Calls takes too much time to finish before the call to hang.

• The shortcut can help, but you can’t activate shortcuts when your iPhone is ringing.

• I resorted to the use of the rear crane gesture to activate my shortcut to check the USNG Chatgpt inlet number.

While Monty Python’s stupid songs for processed meat can be fun, unwanted marketing conversations and emails are not. I’m tired of receiving calls from unrecognized numbers just to turn out to me that I have been in an incident that is not my fault. I thought there could be a way in which a shortcut app could help.

Googling Spam Calls takes too long

It is incredibly disappointing when a phone call comes from a number that is not in my contacts. It is very likely to be a spam call, but it may also be an important call from someone like my doctor or my energy provider I don’t want to miss.

You can guarantee that if I answer it, it will be spam and if I do not, it will be something really important.

So when a number I do not recognize, Google quickly appears to see if it has been reported as an inconvenience. The problem is that by the time I searched for the number and read the results, the call has already gotten out.

I decided to create a shortcut to do the job for me

It happened to me again recently and I started to wonder if there was a way to automate things so that my iPhone would check the number for me when he called a number that was not in my contacts.

I knew I could create a shortcut on my iPhone to make a network search, for example. It seemed to be possible to make a shortcut to check a number for me so that I could quickly find out if it was spam or legal call.

You can’t activate a shortcut when your phone is ringing

However, I hit an obstacle soon. In an ideal world, I could activate my shortcut when I had an incoming call on my iPhone. That way, when my phone raises, it will move shortly. Then I could retrieve the phone number, look for information about this number, and see if it is from a spam call history.

The problem is that although you can activate the automation of your iPhone in a wide variety of different ways, it is currently not possible to activate a shortcut when your iPhone is ringing. This is a pity, as it would definitely be a useful trigger; You can create any number of useful machines from its back. I had to think of another way.

I resorted to the use of the back tap gesture

If it would not be possible to activate my shortcut when the iPhone started ringing, my only opportunity was to start a shortcut manually. I could use the action button on my iPhone 15 Pro, but I already use this for other purposes and there were no shortcuts for shortcuts that I could use to change what does the action button when the phone is ringing.

Instead, I decided to activate the shortcut from the gesture of the rear crane. This is an accessibility gesture that you can use to perform your iPhone, such as opening the camera or control center by tapping the back of your iPhone two or three times. One of the back gesture options is to start a shortcut, so after creating my shortcut, I would be able to start it when my phone rings by touching the back of my iPhone three times.

Planning a shortcut to check the incoming number

The last step was to create a shortcut to check the incoming number when a call appeared. I can use the network search, but this will still require that I look at the results to check that the number is spam or not. I decided that the fastest and easiest way to do it was to ask Chatgpt.

I will need to hand over Chatgpt numbers for the incoming call. As this appears on the screen when the call appears (unless the number is withheld), I could make a shortcut to take a screenshot. Then I could use the action “extracting an image” in the shortcut application that uses optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from an image.

After extracting the text that will include the phone number, I could pass it on to Chatgpt and ask it to search for the number online and tell me if it was likely to be spam.

Create my shortcut

Now that I found out all the steps I needed on my short path, it was time to start building it. The shortcut requires only three work actions.

Open the shortcut app and touch the “+” icon in the upper right corner to create a new shortcut. Tap “Search Actions,” Enter “Screen Photo” and select “Take Screenshot”. Look for “retrieve” and select “extracting text from the image”. This will extract the text from the screen, including the incoming number.

Look for “Chatgpt” and select “Ask Chatgpt” from the results. You can choose which model to use; I chose GPT-4O. Tap “Message” and enter something like this: “Look for the phone number from this text and tell me if it’s safe or spam. Make the first word of the answer or “fraud” or “safe” and keep the answer brief. “

Tap the “image text” from above from the keyboard that will add the text extracted from the screen to your message. Tap the arrow and turn off “continuous chat” so that Chatgpt only gives you one answer.

Tap the shortcut name at the top of the screen and select “renaming”. Give your shortcut a memorable name and touch “Done” to save it.

Assign a shortcut to the gesture on the back of the crane

Once you create your shortcut, the last step is to assign it to the gesture on the back. You must do this through the accessibility settings.

Go to settings> accessibility. Under “physical and motor” select “Touch”. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and select “Tap Back.” Select “Double Tap” or “Triple Tap.” Scroll down and select a shortcut you created. Your shortcut is already tuned to the gesture on the back.

Using my shortcut when I get a call

Now that I have a shortcut adjustment to be performed whenever I use the gesture on the back of the crane, I have a much more chance of seeing if the call is spam before they get hooked. When a call comes and I do not recognize the number, I triple the back of my iPhone and the shortcut works. In a moment or two moment, Chatgpt tells me whether the call is spam or safe and I know whether to answer or not.

A shortcut is not perfect but helps

This method is not perfect and has some major drawbacks. The biggest problem is the caller refuses their number. No check number, so a shortcut becomes useless. Disappointing, some legitimate calls hold their number so that you return to a square.

The other problem is that the method is not immediate. When a call comes in, you have to pick up your phone, perform the Tap Hap gesture and then wait for Chatgpt to check the number. If you are not fast enough, the caller can close before the process is completed.

In many cases, however, it is good enough to work, which allows me to answer legal calls before closing.

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Without the opportunity to activate a shortcut when my iPhone starts ringing, using the rear crane gesture is the best I can do with the iPhone native tools. However, my next plan is to see what I can do with a home assistant. There is a “Phone_state” sensor for Android phones, which will change when the phone is ringing, but that doesn’t exist for the iPhone, so it seems that another solution will be needed.