iOS: Deleting Siri's Training Data

Did you know that the longer you use Siri, the better Apple’s voice assistant will work? It’s true. Here’s how Apple puts it on their “About Siri” support page:

The more you use Siri, the better it will understand you. It does this by learning about your accent and other characteristics of your voice. Siri uses voice recognition algorithms to categorize your voice into one of the dialects or accents it understands. 

Neat! This means, though, that if someone else has used Siri on your device a lot, the service may not function as well as it could. So if you’re noticing that your commands aren’t being recognized or Siri’s making a bunch of errors, you could try resetting its training altogether and starting fresh. This is easy to do, but note that you can’t undo it—so don’t walk through these steps if your version of Siri is working well!

Anyhow, you’ll need to turn two options within Settings off and on again. The first is under Settings> General> Siri—it’s the choice at the top.

When you attempt to turn that off, it’ll warn you, of course, but you’ll also get some important information.

As that warning suggests, you’ll need to head to Settings> General> Keyboards and toggle off “Enable Dictation” to make sure that Siri’s data is well and truly gone.

Once both of those options are off, go ahead and turn them back on, and you should have a clean slate with Siri. This time, though, keep other people’s grubby paws off of your device, and you’ll have a better experience when you want to use voice commands. Way easier said than done, I know.