AI Beats Humans at Lip Reading

Lip reading, an essential tool that helps the hearing-impaired to better understand the world, is now conducted by artificial intelligence with a better accuracy than done by humans, University of Oxford reveals. In an article currently published by Quartz we learn that a new paper issued by the University of Oxford with funding from Alphabet's Deepmind, reveals that they have developed an artificial intelligence system called LipNet that can read lips with an accuracy of 93.4%. University of Oxford has previously released a system that operated word-by-word with an accuracy of 79.9%, but their new system has now developed a new and different way of approaching the problem. "Instead of teaching the AI each mouth movement using a system of visual phonemes, they built it to process whole at a time. That allowed the AI to teach itself what letter corresponds to each slight mouth movement", Quartz writes. The new system was exposed to 29 000 3-second-videos videos labelled with the correct text to train the system, and in comparison with human lip-readers that had an average error rate of 47.7%, the AI's error rate was only 6.6%.