Scientists develop lip-reading computer that can identify languages as well. You can now have a new computer capable of reading lips and identifying different languages. The computer scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England have developed lip-reading computer that can tell the difference between languages, BBC Radio reported.
The team of computer scientists led by Stephen Cox and Jake Newman has developed new technology by statistically modelling the lip motions of 23 bilingual and trilingual speakers, and the technology helps computer to identify the language spoken by an individual with "very high accuracy".
The researchers have claimed that the new technology can identify the languages including English, French, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Polish and Russian.
According to computer scientists, the lip-reading technology has already been developed, but what they have developed is the first ever technology, which can identify different languages. The technology that identifies movement of tongue, jaw and lips while speech is made is called lip-reading technology, which has already been used, but the technology that can identify different languages had been used first time in computer arena.
Professor Stephen Cox said: "This is an exciting advance in automatic lip-reading technology and the first scientific confirmation of something. We already intuitively suspected that when people speak different languages, they use different mouth shapes in different sequences; for example, we found frequent 'lip rounding' among French speakers, and more prominent tongue movements among Arabic speakers."
The scientists hope that the new technology could have practical uses for the deaf people, law enforcement agencies, military units serving overseas, and noisy environments.