The problem with digital assistants is that they listen to every word you tell it. This means that if you stutter or stammer halfway through your command, it will pick up on that and will spit back errors or the wrong information. This can be rather annoying, but Apple is working on a fix for that with Siri.
A report from The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Apple is working on training Siri to better understand atypical speech. This means that if the user might suffer from some kind of speech impediment, Siri will be smart enough, at least in theory, to understand what the user is trying to ask of it.
Apple is said to have trained Siri to better understand atypical speech by building up a bank of 28,000 audio clips taken from podcasts that feature people who stutter, and will be using that information to help its digital assistant understand these types of speaking patterns.
The report goes on to state that Apple will also be introducing a new feature called Hold to Talk for Siri where users can control how long they want Siri to listen before interrupting them. This is useful if you’re trying to ask Siri a particularly long question and don’t want the digital assistant to get ahead of itself.