A team of reserarchers at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, has begun a progject to devise a system for lip reading using computers.. The system would take a video taped conversation and convert it to text.

This technology will become a valuable tool for crime fighting, security and a host of other applications such as mobile phone cameras and in-car speech recognition.

This futuristic system will replace the people who can read lips, such people are shrinking in numbers and even they are no always precise.

The real challenge is getting an accurate computer system that can read lips. The system will have to able to track the speaker's head in various poses, to extract features that describe the lips and then match the movements with corresponding text. This will also include developing a system with a huge lexicon for each language.

System is planned to be developed for English, and a few other languages like modern Arabic , which are quite expressive on the lips and therefore somewhat easier to lip read. Mandarin and such languages are very difficult to lip read.

I disagree...deaf people and hard-of-hearing folks will always be able to read lips. I've got a few friends like that who I can talk normally to as long as I face them when doing it...they have no trouble and I know I don't annunciate as well as I could.

Unless they come up with a way to prevent deafness, I agree there with ethergeek. They'd probably be better than the computers too (until the system got really advanced), and probably it would cost less to employ them than to develop a program that could do as good a job as they could.