Siri says “You need to unlock your iPhone first”

My husband seems to have locked his i Phone XR he only have Siri and emergency only Siri is unable to unlock his phone

[Edited by Moderator]

AntonKorol,

We'd like to request some details that may help facilitate additional answers for this issue. Please share the following, in addition to any details you think may help:

• We understand that this issue was discovered while driving. Is this the only time that this issue happens?
• Does Siri not work with all apps, or just specific apps? If only specific apps, please share an example of what apps do and do not work.
• Does this issue occur when you're not using any accessories?

Cheers.

Hi All,

Just wanted to say I have exactly the same issue as AntonKorol when riding my motorcycle and using my Scala Cardo devices on my iPhone XR.

I have two helmets with two different Scala Cardo ; One old G9 and one brand new Freecom 2+ and I'm unable to use Siri when the iPhone is locked. I have checked the settings you refer to and they are all enabled.

I hope this helps.

Regards

Hi, I’m curious if you ever resolve this issue. I just traded in my beloved iPhone 6s for an iPhone 11 Pro, because my battery wouldn’t stay charged on the iPhone 6s. (Gee, I wonder why that is...). But I digress. Anyway, I’ve been having the same issue as you’ve been having and it’s very frustrating. It worked like a charm on the iPhone 6s, and was very useful. There’s absolutely no use in having to unlock your phone every time do you want Siri to do something. It defeats the purpose. So I’m reaching out to see if you found a solution. Thank you

This is SO infuriating and happens to be often... ESPECIALLY when in my car. I thought it might be some sort of bluetooth interference but I have removed the phone from the bluetooth pairing as I just prefer to wear one ear bud.

Some days it works and some days.. like today.... "you'll need to unlock you iPhone first"

After I have used Hey Siri or double tapped 15 times that day with no problem... all the sudden.. this pops up... sometimes it then goes away.... sometimes its like that the whole drive....

SO FRUSTRATING.

Sorry, AntonKorol, who you asked, cannot have Apple iron out anything. They are a user just like you, and just like everyone else in this user-to-user forum. It also isn’t a “bug”; a bug is something that doesn’t work the way it was designed to work. It is clearly designed to work this way. If you don’t like the way it was designed to work you can let Apple know here→https://apple.com/feedback and let the developers of Pandora know by contacting them in the link in their app store listing, and probably also in the Pandora app itself using the Help function.

The only workaround I have discovered so far is to use Maps and have Siri navigate for every trip. If navigation is active, then voice commands all work. I would prefer to have a setting that allows all voice commands regardless of whether I am navigating, but at least this makes the iphone usable when driving.

The discussion was that users what to listen to messages WITHOUT having to unlock the phone. That is what I was answering. If you can ask siri to play your messages without unlocking the phone a thief could easily do that.

I think we are loosing track of the issue. this basically getting Siri to read the last unread message that came in, its not "hey Siri, read me every single text message stored in my iPhone". so going down this road of "for security reasons" I think it's BS. on my previous post, I mentioned I called Apple and they were no help. actually, the senior tech that I got was very quick to tell me that they removed the feature "due to security reason, we removed that feature" when I challenged him by asking why the settings are still shown on the phone, he just responded that its been deactivated and hung up on me 😳. once I discovered I was saying the wrong command and that fixed my issue, I realized that he just didn't know how to help me and gave me a response that in theory could not be challenged. my basic thought process there is that Apple would not list something on its phone settings or webpage if it was removed for "security reasons". if it really was the case, they would really remove it with no trace of it on the phone or webpage..

same problem whenever im driving and i tell siri to call anyone it responds with youll need to unlock your iphone first. Note i own an iphone 12 pro max

The fix is to have “Hey Siri” active in settings. If you say “Hey Siri” when asking for messages Siri will read them.

Apple could have just given us a god **** option to turn it on or off.