The New Lip Reading Super-Computer!

21st March 2017 | Andy Field

Oxford Scientists have invented an incredible artificial intelligence system that can allegedly lip read more accurately than highly trained humans.

Watch, Attend and Spell

When tested, ‘Watch, Attend and Spell’ as the system has become known, can accurately pinpoint around 50% of words from silent clips – now, this may sound a little underwhelm-ing, however, when professional lip readers were shown the same silent clips they were only able to pick out 12% of words.

One of the reasons the system can vastly out perform highly trained professionals is be-cause it has become adept at recognising which words often follow others, making words with very similar mouth shapes such as bat, mat and pat far easier to guess.

Fluent in news-speak

After examining 118,000 sentences from a range of BBC news programmes including Breakfast, Question Time and Newsnight, the software now has a vocabulary of a whop-ping 17,500 words. It understands that ‘Prime’ usually precedes ‘Minister’, but struggles to comprehend words or phrases not spoken by newsreaders.

Understandably the system is still only in its infancy, but with each new clip it watches it’s able to teach itself new words and phrases. As the software becomes more advanced it’s hoped that it can improve subtitles on live tv, helping dictation to smartphones in noisy environments and even dubbing old silent movies.

Here at Planet Telecom we feel that this technology could prove a massive leap forward for those that are hard of hearing, as well as improving voice recognition and could possibly even allow deaf people to make phone calls with ease. Don’t forget, Planet Telecom offers stupendously good deals on international calls and we’re always striving to make our deals as easy and accessible as possible.

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