Google's AI can now lip read better than humans after watching thousands of hours of TV

The research follows similar work published by a separate group at the University of Oxford earlier this month. Using related techniques, these scientists were able to create a lip-reading program called LipNet that achieved 93.4 percent accuracy in tests, compared to 52.3 percent human accuracy. However, LipNet was only tested on specially-recorded footage that used volunteers speaking formulaic sentences. By comparison, DeepMind's software -- known as "Watch, Listen, Attend, and Spell" -- was tested on far more challenging footage; transcribing natural, unscripted conversations from BBC politics shows.DeepMind's AI program was trained on 5,000 hours of TV More than 5,000 hours of footage from TV shows including Newsnight, Question Time, and the World Today, was used to train DeepMind's "Watch, Listen, Attend, and Spell" program. The videos included 118,000 difference sentences and some 17,500 unique words, compared to LipNet's test database of video of just 51 unique words.