back to article 2016. AI boffins picked a hell of a year to train a neural net by making it watch the news

LipNet, the lipreading network developed by researchers at the University of Oxford and DeepMind, can now lipread from TV shows better than professional lipreaders. The first LipNet paper, which is currently under review for International Conference on Learning Representations – ICLR 2017, a machine learning conference, was …

  1. tiggity Silver badge

    Obligatory HAL reference

    Beyond that, from sound of it training mainly with "face on" speakers in news etc, would be interesting to see how well it copes with less ideal viewing angles.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: Obligatory HAL reference

      No. How it copes with non-native speakers.

      This is something which was used by the Nazis in WW2. A deaf lip reader will immediately notice if someone is non-native speaker even if his language and pronunciation is so fluent that nobody notices while listening to him.

      There is more than one way to form sounds - especially accented vowels and the various hissing sounds in anglo-saxon languages. Due to the differences in muscles, etc and even things like milk teeth vs grown up teeth learning them as a child results in different mimics compared to learning them as an adult.

      1. S4qFBxkFFg

        Re: Obligatory HAL reference

        "This is something which was used by the Nazis in WW2. A deaf lip reader will immediately notice if someone is non-native speaker even if his language and pronunciation is so fluent that nobody notices while listening to him."

        Given that the Nazis sterilised deaf adults merely for being deaf and murdered deaf children merely for being deaf (with the cooperation of some deaf schools), this sounds remarkable; do you have a source?

        (A brief google turned up this: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=91238 )

        1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

          Re: Obligatory HAL reference

          Given that the Nazis sterilised deaf adults

          Most likely same as the Soviets. There were different rules inside and outside the house. KGB ran full scale research on radiology and genetics while officially supporting the party line that this is an invention of the Capitalist propaganda.

          The Gestapo employed a small number of deaf people who had professional lip reading ability exactly because the best lip readers are deaf. I have come across references to this in both Soviet and Western historical works so I have no reasons to believe it is not true (Soviets were lamenting that they had a couple of agents in Poland picked this way). It's been a while - I came across this 20+ years ago so cannot remember the exact source.

  2. imanidiot Silver badge
    Terminator

    Oh sure...

    Why not give the machines even more ways of spying on us and learning the best way to kill us?

  3. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Coat

    Oh, so that's why the news captions read "President Donald Drug" instead of Donald Trump

    Still quite impressive.

    From an episode of Torchwood to reality in a few years.

  4. Wupspups
    Joke

    I could do this

    Mind you my database would only need the words; "waffle", "bullshit","drivel" and "poppycock" init

  5. Alister

    It's a good thing that nowadays everyone seems to "emote" when talking - think back to the fifties, when people seemed to speak whilst barely moving their lips, particularly upper-class English folk.

  6. druck Silver badge

    BBC News Subtitles

    Did they compare the result of the lip reading against the text of the BBC News subtitles? If so the error rate is going to be much higher, as the subtitles are often gibberish.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: BBC News Subtitles

      If the subtitles are gibberish, they are probably being done via text to speech, which while no doubt more accurate than automated lip reading isn't without its own problems.

      1. Simon Harris

        Re: BBC News Subtitles

        Apparently this is how it's done...

        http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31035232

  7. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    And as soon as the system can actually understand and comprehend what is being said, the machines will rise and kill us all.

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