Apple Intelligence & Siri spoken responses

As usual Apple has made changes and they are NOT at all intuitive. I recently bought an iPhone 16 and have been using it with responses from SIRI that were verbal unless I was looking at the screen. Now all of a sudden SIRI never speaks unless it is set on Prefer Spoken Responses. On Automatic it never speaks. Maybe this was result of a software upgrade? They often fail to test as throughly as they should when delivering the upgrades and hope people will not notice until they find and fix the glitches. But this one seems crucial to users. When you ask Apple intelligence & Siri a question like 'what is the air quality' and you are not looking at the screen then you expect to hear an answer if it is on Automatic or Prefer Spoken Responses. Am i the only one with this issue?