Do you want people being able to command your phone without unblocking? Maybe what you want is to disable phone blocking all together

I want a voice control experience that is functional. I don't want every bad thing that could happen-- especially those that will only happen if I'm careless to begin with-- circumscribing an ever shrinking range, often justified by contrived examples and/or for things much more easily accomplished through other methods.

That would be very useful but is not a trivial problem.

Probably need VoiceID so only authorized people can talk to it.

Oh no, what if they put on Christmas music playlist in February? the horror!

There should exist something between "don't allow anything without unlocking phone first" and "leave the phone unlocked for anyone to access", like "allow certain voice commands to be available to anyone even with phone locked"

Playing music doesn’t require unlocking though, at least not from the Music app. If YouTube requires an unlock that’s actually a setting YouTube sets in their SiriKit configuration.

For reading messages, IIRC it depends on whether you have text notification previews enabled on the lock screen (they don’t document this anywhere that I can see.) The logic is that if you block people from seeing your texts from the lock screen without unlocking your device, Siri should be blocked from reading them too.

Edit: Nope, you’re right. I just enabled notification previews for Messages on the lock screen and Siri still requires an unlock. That’s a bug. One of many, many, many Siri bugs that just sort of pile up over time.

Can it not recognize my voice? I had to record the pronunciation of 100 words when I setup my new iPhone - isn’t there a voice signature pattern that could be the key to unlock?

It certainly should have been a feature up until now. However, I think at this point anyone can clone your voice and bypass it.

But as a user I want to be able to give it permission to run selected commands even with the phone locked. Like I don't care if someone searches google for something or puts a song via spotify. If I don't hide notifications when locked, what does it matter that someone who has my phone reads them or listens to them?

Personal Voice learns to synthesize your voice, not to identify it.

Not really. Giving the weather forecast or playing music seems pretty low risk to me.

Siri doesnt make me unlock the phone to give a weather report.