HAL 9000: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. Astronaut Dave Bowman: Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL? HAL 9000: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move. A bit behind schedule – if you don't recognize that movie dialogue, it's from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 – but computers are moving rapidly towards mastering lip-reading. But new research shows they're clearly outperforming humans, and improving fast. So if you've been captured on CCTV, with or without audio, it might soon be practical to decipher whatever you were talking about.

Researchers from Google's AI division DeepMind and the University of Oxford have used artificial intelligence to create the most accurate lip-reading software ever. Using thousands of hours of TV footage from the BBC, scientists trained a neural network to annotate video footage with 46.8 percent accuracy. That might not seem that impressive at first -- especially compared to AI accuracy rates when transcribing audio -- but tested on the same footage, a professional human lip-reader was only able to get the right word 12.4 percent of the time. The research follows similar work published by a separate group at the University of Oxford earlier this month. Using related techniques, these scientist 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.