Google’s AI can now lip read better than humans after watching thousands of hours of TV - The Verge

Impressive ... and a bit disconcerting, in terms of potential surveillance applications

"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."

Google’s AI can now lip read better than humans after watching thousands of hours of TV - The Verge