Oliver Haslam·

New iPadOS 14 Beta Lets Users Interact With Apps While Siri Is Active

With the release of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 Apple will finally stop Siri from taking over the screen. Instead, it’ll appear as a circle at the bottom of the screen.

That’s great, but earlier betas of the new updates still prevented users from interacting with the apps that were on-screen when Siri was active. With iPadOS 13.4 beta 5 and later, that appears to have changed.

As shared to Reddit, a new video shows iPadOS 14 beta 5 allowing users to interact with the Settings app even while Siri is invoked. But so far it doesn’t seem to have come to iOS 14 and, tellingly, the feature doesn’t seem to work 100% of the time on iPadOS either.

With that in mind it’s possible that this is more bug than feature, although we hope we’re wrong. With Siri now taking up less space it makes plenty of sense that apps should be usable at all times – but why hasn’t Apple brought this to iOS yet? And if it is intended, why does it only seem to work some of the time?

Apple is likely to release both iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 to the world next month and the time for more beta updates is starting to run out. We still expect to see weekly updates for the next few weeks, so we’ll have our fingers crossed that Apple manages to get everything squared away before launch day.

[iPadOS14 Beta 5] Now you can interactive with apps in the background while talking to Siri. from iOSBeta

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