The researchers, working with Google's artificial intelligence division DeepMind, trained the software on more than 30,000 videos of test subjects speaking sentences. Over time, it would match certain words with particular lip movements to learn what words were being spoken. The researchers then played it further videos of people speaking sentences and the LipNet software succeeded with 93.4 per cent accuracy. This compares to 52.3 per cent for hearing impaired students, and surpassed other lip-reading programs. Unlike previous software, LipNet digested the phrases as full sentences, and allowing it to put words in context rather than decipher them individually allowed much greater accuracy.

Even professional lip-readers can figure out only 20% to 60% of what a person is saying. Slight movements of a person's lips at the speed of natural speech are immensely difficult to reliably understand, especially from a distance or if the lips are obscured. And lip-reading isn't just a plot point in NCIS: It's an essential tool to understand the world for the hearing-impaired, and if automated reliably, could help millions. A new paper (pdf) from the University of Oxford (with funding from Alphabet's DeepMind) details an artificial intelligence system, called LipNet, that watches video of a person speaking and matches text to the movement of their mouth with 93.4% accuracy. The previous state of the art system operated word-by-word, and had an accuracy of 79.6%.

DeepMind will not build an unstoppable AI on its own. Instead, both companies will release a series of programming tools on early 2017 that will allow researchers and hobbyist around the world build and train their bots to play Starcraft II. Google's DeepMind researcher Orion Vinyals made the announcement during BlizzCon 2016 at Anaheim, California. Vinyals was the top-ranked SC2 player in Spain's leaderboards before becoming a top scientist in the British AI startup. Vinyals believes the results of the investigation could translate to the real life.

Earlier this year, researchers' artificial intelligence beat a human in the dazzlingly complex board game known as Go. It was a milestone in machine learning. Now, the same Google-backed researchers who designed AlphaGo have their sights set on dominating a new game: Starcraft, the classic computer strategy game that has attracted millions of fans, some of whom duel online in professional tournaments hosted by real-life sports leagues. Researchers from U.K.-based DeepMind want to train a bot that can play StarCraft II in real time -- making decisions about which military units to send on scouting missions, and how to allocate resources and ultimately conquer other players. Beginning next year, the game will serve as a research platform for any AI researcher who wants to use it, potentially allowing myriad player-algorithms to train off of the same game.

DeepMind and Blizzard Entertainment are collaborating to open up StarCraft II to artificial intelligence and machine learning researchers globally. According to a DeepMind blog post by research scientist Oriol Vinyais, StarCraft II continues the series' renowned eSports tradition, as the original StarCraft was played in the late 1990s yet remains popular today. StarCraft is a good testing environment to work with because it provides a "useful bridge to the messiness of the real world," and the skills needed to play in this environment could transfer easily to real-world tasks, wrote Vinyais. DeepMind is looking to work with Blizzard in order to create "curriculum" scenarios, which means researchers will be faced with complex tasks that researchers will need to complete in order to get an agent up and running. Agents will play directly from pixels, and to get DeepMind there, a new image-based interface that outputs a simplified low-resolution RGB image data for the map and minimap was created, according to Vinyais.

Google's DeepMind is teaming up with the makers of the StarCraft video game to train its artificial intelligence systems. The AI systems "playing" the game will need to learn strategies similar to those that humans need in the real world, DeepMind said. Its ultimate aim is to develop artificial intelligence that could solve any problem. It has previously taught algorithms to play a range of Atari computer games. StarCraft II, made by developer Blizzard, is a real-time strategy game in which players control one of three warring factions - humans, insects or alien elves.

Blizzard made a very curious announcement about Starcraft II at BlizzCon 2016. Instead of a new expansion pack, the game is instead being opened up to Google's Deepmind project; and will teach the AI system how to play an RTS. Deepmind made headlines earlier this year when its AlphaGo AI managed to beat a world class Go player; a feat that was believed to be impossible. The number of possible actions in Go was originally thought to be too great for a computer to calculate within the time constraints of a professional match. Despite this, Deepmind pulled off a 4 – 1 victory over Lee Sedol.

DeepMind, the AI research lab in London that was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported £400 million, faces one big problem, according to Professor Yann LeCun, who heads up Facebook's AI research group. Notably, LeCun believes that DeepMind, which employs over 250 people and today sits under Alphabet (Google's parent company), is too far away from California. "The challenge I think that DeepMind has is that it's geographically separated from the mothership in California and that makes it very difficult to build technology that can be used in products," LeCun told Business Insider during an interview in London last week. "So it pushes DeepMind to some extent to try to survive on its own." DeepMind declined to comment on this story but it would likely argue that being based in the UK is not a barrier when it comes to working with product and research teams across Google and the rest of the Alphabet group.

AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence program powered by Google's DeepMind, defeated South Korean world Go champion Lee Sedol convincingly with a 4-1 score earlier in the year. It seems that DeepMind is now moving on to a bigger challenge, going from an ancient board game into a modern strategy video game. At the ongoing BlizzCon 2016, Blizzard and Google announced a collaboration to open up StarCraft II as an AI and machine learning environment for researchers around the world. StarCraft II is one of the most fiercely competitive video games that is played professionally, and according to the DeepMind team, it will provide an interesting testing environment for research in AI as it "provides a useful bridge to the messiness of the real-world." "The skills required for an agent to progress through the environment and play StarCraft well could ultimately transfer to real-world tasks," said Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist for DeepMind who was once the top-ranked player of the game in Spain.

From Chess to Go, board games have been the first frontier of artificial intelligence research for decades. Now, the team at Google's DeepMind wants to take AI to a whole new level in order to beat the online strategy game, StarCraft II. DeepMind announced its decision to partner with StarCraft's creator, Blizzard, at a conference in California. The two groups say that they look forward to programming a computer to react to strategic problems in real time. "DeepMind is on a scientific mission to push the boundaries of AI, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be told how," wrote DeepMind in a blog post.