{"id":29449,"date":"2023-09-26T18:06:51","date_gmt":"2023-09-27T01:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=29449"},"modified":"2023-09-27T06:29:42","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T13:29:42","slug":"iphone-speaker-call-audio-routing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/iphone-speaker-call-audio-routing\/","title":{"rendered":"What Would Make an iPhone Answer on Speaker?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, Steve started having a problem with his iPhone while connected via Bluetooth to his Tesla Model Y\u2019s entertainment system. If while actively playing a podcast, he received a phone call, the iPhone would disconnect from Bluetooth, stopping the podcast, and answer on the phone’s speaker. As annoying as that was, when he hung up the phone, the phone did not reconnect to Bluetooth and instead would play his podcast out of the speakerphone.<\/p>\n

He took his car into Tesla service for some other small ailment and while he was there he asked them to check it out to see if they could figure out why the Tesla system was acting this way. They were unable to find the root cause or even reproduce the problem.<\/p>\n

Over the last few years, I’ve got to have a really<\/em> good reason to call Steve while he\u2019s driving because I know that until he stops the car, he won\u2019t be able to get his podcast playing properly again until he ends his drive. Not everyone else is as courteous as me, so he was often in this annoying situation. To be fair, we don\u2019t get all that many phone calls these days but it sure did bother him when it happened.<\/p>\n

We did a lot of experiments with my phone in his car and his phone in my car (both Teslas), and there seemed to be something wrong with his phone rather than his car. For the life of us, we couldn\u2019t figure out what was causing it though.<\/p>\n

In the time he\u2019s been suffering this issue, he\u2019s upgraded his phone twice and the problem trotted along following him but we couldn\u2019t think of any more experiments to run to narrow down what was causing this frustrating behavior.<\/p>\n

This week we were on a plane and had just landed in Los Angeles. Steve received a phone call, and to the annoyance of everyone around him, when he answered it, it was on speaker.<\/p>\n

When he got off the call, I asked him how that happened, and he said, \u201cMy phone always<\/em> answers on speaker. It\u2019s really annoying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though we hadn\u2019t talked about the problem in his car for many months, I suddenly wondered whether the two things could be connected. Rather than searching the Internet for \u201ciPhone Tesla Bluetooth disconnect\u201d, as we had been, I searched for \u201cStop iPhone from answering on speaker\u201d.<\/p>\n

I was rewarded with the opposite answer, how to enable<\/em> speaker on answer, but I\u2019m clever enough to read instructions backward.<\/p>\n

It turns out there\u2019s a setting that controls this behavior, and you\u2019d simply never find it on your own. If you have the use of your hands, you\u2019d naturally look into the iPhone settings. But this feature isn\u2019t for people without mobility challenges. Imagine you\u2019re a quadriplegic and can\u2019t answer the phone by touching a button. Wouldn\u2019t it be swell if it answered on speakerphone automatically? That word \u201ctouch\u201d is your clue for where to look.<\/p>\n

The setting to control this function is in Settings > Accessibility and then go into Touch. Within that section look for Call Audio Routing. When we looked at Steve\u2019s phone, it was set to Speaker. The other two options are Bluetooth Headset and Automatic. When we looked at my phone, it was set to Automatic. We changed Steve\u2019s to Automatic and were quite anxious to get home and find out whether we\u2019d finally solved his problem.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Settings
Open Settings and go to Accessibility<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Accessibility
In Accessibility open Touch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n\"Touch
Inside Touch, Select Call Audio Routing<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\"Change
\nChange from Speaker to Automatic
\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

When we got home from our trip, our new iPhones 15 were waiting for us, thanks to our dear friend Pat Dengler who picked them up and<\/em> delivered them to us while we were gone. We spent our first evening home setting up the new phones with delight.<\/p>\n

The next morning, Steve went out for a drive and asked me to call him while he was listening to a podcast. The Tesla app lets me see his car, see exactly where it is, and even see whether he\u2019s listening to audio. Not only that, I can actually see what he\u2019s playing AND mess with it! To date, I haven\u2019t taken the opportunity to just keep hitting rewind remotely to see if I can get him to lose his mind, but I could. One reason I don\u2019t is that I\u2019ve given him access to my car in his<\/em> Tesla app.<\/p>\n

I digress. When I called him on the phone, he was positively giddy that the phone answered on the car’s speaker over Bluetooth, and even better when I hung up, the car\u2019s audio system resumed playing his podcast.<\/p>\n

But then I realized something. He had a brand new phone. We hadn\u2019t definitively done a properly controlled test.<\/p>\n

Rather than move his eSIM back to his iPhone 14 to run the test, he suggested he just toggle the Touch setting in Accessibility back to Speaker to see if it went back to the old behavior. Sure enough, that setting caused his phone to answer over the iPhone\u2019s speaker, just like it says on the tin. He put it back to Automatic and Bluetooth was again happily working.<\/p>\n

This is one of those obscure tips that may help just one person someday if they come across this article, but it made Steve so happy we wanted to share.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, Steve started having a problem with his iPhone while connected via Bluetooth to his Tesla Model Y\u2019s entertainment system. If while actively playing a podcast, he received a phone call, the iPhone would disconnect from Bluetooth, stopping the podcast, and answer on the phone’s speaker. As annoying as that was, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[102,1325,70,1230,6070,3384],"class_list":["post-29449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-bluetooth","tag-bluetooth-speaker","tag-iphone","tag-speaker","tag-speaker-phone","tag-tesla"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Change-Speaker-to-Automatic-as-explained-in-the-article-1040x520-1.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29449"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29459,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29449\/revisions\/29459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}