ISimpleAudioPlayer Issues on iOS and with SpeechRecognizer

Question

I am using a simple audio player implementation to play audio, but having issues only on a physical iOS device:

1) In silent mode, the audio does not play
2) I always want the audio to play through the devices speakers, but after using SpeechRecognizer - the audio starts playing through the phone earpiece.

How can I make sure the audio always plays through the standard loud speakers, and also make sure that when I am using SpeechRecognizer the mode doesn't switch to playing sounds through the earpiece. No issues at all with Android.

Sample Code I am using for simple audio playback.

        public ISimpleAudioPlayer AudioPlayer => _audioPlayer;

        private void StopAudio()
        {
            if(_audioPlayer.IsPlaying)
                _audioPlayer.Stop();
        }

        private void PlayAudio(string audioFile)
        {
            if(_audioPlayer.IsPlaying)
                _audioPlayer.Stop();

            _audioPlayer = CrossSimpleAudioPlayer.CreateSimpleAudioPlayer();

            _audioPlayer.Load(audio);
            _audioPlayer.Play();
        }

Speech Recognizer Usage (Azure Speech to Text)

_speechRecognizer = new SpeechRecognizer(config);
await _speechRecognizer.StartContinuousRecognitionAsync();

...

Answer 1

I had to resolve this issue by writing a custom AudioService for both iOS and Android:

I followed these articles:

//Implementing Audio service using depdency injection for both Android/IOS
https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2018/03/29/xamarin-forms-audio.aspx

//Details on the sound play output mode in iOS
https://alexdunn.org/2017/07/27/xamarin-tip-playing-audio-through-the-earpiece-in-ios/

Essentially I had to allow the audio to be set to a specific mode in iOS to work, in addition to this; prior to each listening session I had to re-instantiate t he SpeechRecognizer object:

//Before each time you want to begin speech to text
var config = SpeechConfig.FromSubscription(...,...);
_speechRecognizer = new SpeechRecognizer(config);