Choosing a Kid

Ever need a choose between your children? In a fair, rational, utterly uncompromising, robotic and completely final way?

I used Apple Shortcuts to build a quick script to do this; No more coin flipping for me. As a bonus, Shortcuts has really easy ways to get voice control (“Hey Siri, Choose Kid”) and get text-to-speech (it will say “I choose Kid 1” vs. just printing it out on your phone screen), making it useful for your pre-literate kids as well.¹

The Tech Details

Apple Shortcuts on iOS is a great for really simple mini-apps like this.

The Math:Calculator action can generate a random number between 0 and 1, and the Scripting:If action can check if the number is greater than 0.5 or not. If it is, have Shortcuts speak the name of Kid 1, and if it isn’t, then Shortcuts will speak the name of Kid 2.

The Shortcut is only 6 actions in total. Here’s a link to the Shortcut here if you’d like to check it out. You may need to enable external Shortcuts when you import this into your own Shortcut library.