Speech Disfluency

Any interruption to the normal flow of speech, including repetitions of sounds or words, prolongations of sounds, blocks (involuntary pauses), interjections, and revisions. While everyone experiences occasional disfluency, persistent speech disfluency conditions such as stammering and cluttering are neurological in nature and affect how a person interacts with speech-based technologies. Speech disfluency is a critical accessibility consideration for automatic speech recognition systems, voice assistants, and conversational user interfaces, which are typically trained on fluent speech data and may misinterpret or reject disfluent speech patterns.