For millions who can't hear, lip reading offers a window into conversations that would be lost without it. But the practice is hard--and the results are often inaccurate (as you can see in these Bad Lip Reading videos). Now, researchers are reporting a new artificial intelligence (AI) program that outperformed professional lip readers and the best AI to date, with just half the error rate of the previous best algorithm. If perfected and integrated into smart devices, the approach could put lip reading in the palm of everyone's hands. "It's a fantastic piece of work," says Helen Bear, a computer scientist at Queen Mary University of London who was not involved with the project.

If the lip-reading technology had been used during the 2006 World Cup Final, when Zinedine Zidane was given a red card for headbutting Marco Materazzi, the outcome of the game could have been different. Closer analysis of the event revealed that Zidane responded to Materazzi insulting his family. "If we'd had live lip-reading technology they probably would have both been red carded," said Dr Helen Bear, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in Norwich who has developed a lip-reading artificial intelligence program. The new technology can lip-read better than humans could help solve crimes by analysing speech in CCTV footage. The visual speech recognition technology can decipher human conversation in videos when there isn't clear audio available, as is often the case with surveillance footage.