Lip-Reading By AI Self-Driving Cars Is Either Alarming Or Ingenious

Lip-Reading By AI Self-Driving Cars Is Either Alarming Or Ingenious

AI-enabled lip-reading and the advent of self-driving cars. Spy movies used to include a pivotal moment involving a secret agent that would surreptitiously read the lips of someone seated at a table while behind a pane of glass such as in a distant restaurant or high-rise building. Upon cleverly deciphering the mouthing words of what the person was saying, the secret agent would finally know the truth about a crucial matter. Such is the glory of being able to do lip-reading. The ability to read lips is considered a vaunted skill and one that can be challenging to master. This capability to do speech reading is pretty tricky in a myriad of ways. First, you need to be able to visually see the lips of the person that you are trying to decipher. That might seem like an obvious requirement, but the point is that sometimes the lips are not particularly easy to see. The person doing the speaking might have their hands up toward their mouth, partially covering their lips from view. You see this happen intentionally in baseball games when the catcher goes out to the mound to chat with the pitcher, and they both cover their mouths