READ MY LIPS

GOOGLE and a research group from the University of Oxford have been working on an AI system that can read lips, apparently with better success than humans. Lip- reading is not a common skill. But people with hearing impairments often learn it and, along with hearing aids, manage to understand what others are saying. Now things could be a lot easier if Google provides access to the technology.

Interestingly, a deep learning system was exposed to 5,000 hours of BBC television shows. It involved 1,18,000 sentences, according to a study titled Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild, and results have shown that the system is outperforming humans at this skill. The study envisages applications such as dictating to a phone in a noisy environment, translation and transcription, redubbing films, resolving multitalker speech and generally improving speech recognition.