The Selenium wait commands can help improve automated test scripts by giving the DOM time to load HTML elements or pages, preventing tests from crashing easily. The three main wait commands are implicit, explicit, and fluent waits. Implicit waits pause for a specified amount of time to allow the DOM to load, while explicit waits wait until specific conditions are met in the DOM before throwing an exception. Fluent waits are similar to explicit waits but don't wait the maximum time specified and instead pause until the element is discoverable in the DOM. Using these wait commands can help improve test performance and reliability by preventing tests from crashing due to timeouts or element exceptions.