Keep those lips sealed! Tech companies can now read them

“Start navigation, please,” said the driver in the car with noisy passengers. But a smart AI-powered system complimented by a large dataset of possible combinations of lip movements and words can accurately decode the speaker’s words, Prof Shah described in a research paper titled ‘Harnessing AI for Speech Reconstruction using Multi-View Silent Video Feed’. Prof Shah’s team is said to have built the world’s first-ever intelligible speech reading system in 2018, that uses multiple camera views to decode silent speech, a step up from single-view systems that may not account for distractions in a car or home setting. AI-powered tools are built on huge amounts of data that is only accessible by big companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, making it easier for them to devise automatic speech recognition systems, Shah comments. Government use of such tech or of data gathered through such tech, again is a certainty.” Nappinai gives the example of a double murder in January 2017, explaining, “In this case of 2018, it required a court order, which was granted, for the Amazon Echo recordings to be released.” From the tech developer perspective, responsible tech is the key, she adds and thus concludes, “From a user perspective, it is important that they understand the extent to which a product compromises privacy before purchasing or using the same.