Lip reading, a dreamed-of utility feature for uncounted AI use cases, appears near commercial availability. The news buoys the hopes of some and causes concern in others. An Irish startup, Liopa, is trialing a phone application that reportedly can interpret simple phrases mouthed by people. The underlying algorithms do not require audio to be trained, which should streamline product development, market introduction and customer training. In a Liopa marketing video, a young man who is unable to speak mouths short sentences looking into a phone camera, and pauses. The Speech Recognition App for the Voice Impaired, or Sravi, offers three guesses about what the person is trying to say.

A lip-reading app from Irish startup Liopa is said to represent a breakthrough in the field of visual speech recognition (VSR), which trains AI to read lips without any audio input. Liopa's product, SRAVI (Speech Recognition App for the Voice Impaired) is a communication aid for speech-impaired patients. It is likely to be the first lip-reading AI app available for public purchase, according to an account from Vice/Motherboard. Researchers driven by a range of potential commercial applications including surveillance tools have been working for years to teach computers to lip-read, and it has proven a challenging task. Liopa is working to certify SRAVI as a Class I medical device in Europe, hoping to complete the certification by August.

We may think that when we speak to another person, the sound of their voice is the most important way we understand them. But masks are teaching us that this might not be the case. In fact, a large part of verbal communication involves reading the context of what a person is saying – analysing their facial expressions, hand gestures, tone of voice – and it also means reading their lips. You may not have realized that you read lips, until the point when everyone's face was covered by a mask during the Covid pandemic. Suddenly, it has dawned on humans that we ALL read lips, to some extent.