Siri not spelling out words

I remember using my older iPhone and giving Siri the command to spell words that I didn’t know how to spell, by simply saying “hey siri, spell (whatever word I wanted to know the spelling of)” and then Siri would spell out the word, however on my new iPhone 15 this isn’t working anymore, instead Siri goes on the baidu search engine and just says “here’s what I found”. I am in China and wonder if that is the reason why it’s doing that? Same thing for giving word definitions, Siri isn’t doing that anymore.. please help, somebody, anybody… 🙏