As a former iPhone repair technician, I can confirm this is both true and false at the same time. There’s a speaker in the normal position for the ear as well, it all depends whether the user decided to put the phone into loudspeaker mode.
This comment coming from an Android user that’s just as guilty of this at times.
That sounds like a combo reflex if you ask me, which actually does happen to me around 20 minutes after I take a vitamin B12 pill. I’ll get like all the reflexes all at once, sneeze, hiccups, coughing, urge to vomit, all at once. All from a vitamin B12 pill. Never again!