Google's DeepMind learns to lip-read better than humans

Google may have found a way to use machine learning technology to help millions of deaf and hearing-impaired people better understand what people are saying to them. Researchers from Google Inc.'s DeepMind artificial intelligence project, which built the boardgame-playing AlphaGo that managed to successfully defeat one of the top Go players in the world, have teamed up with peers at the Oxford University to create an AI system that's able to outperform professional lip-readers after training itself on thousands of hours of BBC videos. New Scientist reports that in tests, a human lip-reader who provides services for the U.K. courts was able to correctly decipher only about a quarter of words spoken when shown a random sample from 200 BBC video broadcasts. However, DeepMind's AI system was able to decipher almost half of the words from the same sample videos. In addition, the AI was able to annotate 46 percent of the words without error, compared with just 12 percent by the human lip-reader.