This tutorial is a guest post from A-lister, Sr. RPA Consultant & Solutions Architect, and You Tuber Azhar Hossain. Azhar is a creative problem solver and someone with a genuine passion for tech & automation. He was generous enough to create this really fun Siri & Automation Anywhere integration video to share with the Automation Anywhere developer community as a part of #BotGames. If you have an idea for a blog post or tutorial that you think would benefit the Automation Anywhere developer community, let us know at developer@automationanywhere.com.

Bots are awesome. They enable individuals and organizations to automate repetitive, mundane, and mind-numbing work. Most commonly though, people are running their bots using basic schedules or directory-watching triggers. In this tutorial, we want to explore how users can interface with Siri to trigger bots on an unattended bot runner...and while triggering itself is cool, A-Lister Azhar Hossain takes things even further by also passing data from Siri to a bot so that the bot can take appropriate action based in an input.

Requirements

To follow along with this tutorial you'll need 2 main things that not EVERYONE will have, so just wanted to call that out here:

1. You'll need an Apple device (iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch) running iOS 12.0 or later, or a Mac laptop/desktop running Catalina (10.15) or later. This is required for the configuration of the shortcut that Siri relies on for querying for details on the bot to execute and triggering the bot.
2. You'll need an Automation Anywhere environment where you have access to an unattended Bot Runner. Developer licenses can't be triggered to run bots from the Control Room API, so you'll need an unattended bot runner device that Siri can trigger.
3. You'll need an API-Key for the account you want Siri to use for triggering your bots. This is likely NOT going to be the same account as the Bot Runner account, but typically a service or admin account that can be used for invoking bots from the CR API.
   1. To get an API key, log into the Control Room and click on your account username in the bottom of the left sidebar.
   2. On the My Settings page that is displayed, the Generate API-Key button is in the top right corner.
   3. Note: if you already have an API-key for this account, use your existing API-key. If you generate a new one, it will invalidate the other key (which may or may not have been used for some other use case you implemented)

Conclusion

Hopefully you had fun with this tutorial from Azhar Hossain. If this is your first time using the Automation Anywhere Control Room, you may consider taking a look at the Intro to the Control Room API Using Postman video or its follow-up - Triggering a Bot from the Control Room API.  

Azhar Hossain

A-lister, Sr. RPA Consultant & Solutions Architect Azhar is on the Top 20 global RPA thought leader & influencer list published by Thinkers360. He is passionate about helping people in all aspects of digital transformation. He loves creating YouTube videos and playing video games.

You can find more of his work on YouTube and also find him on LinkedIn.