According to your report,there will be a machine that lip-reads (Read my lips? One day soon, a machine could do it, or 25 April). The myth that lip-reading solves deaf people’s problems and makes us into hearing people simply will not recede away,since our culture keeps the hidden disability of deafness good where it is. Lip-reading is not an exact science, but is mostly sheer guesswork, or based on working out from the conversations context,facial expression, body language and visemes, and shapes that can be seen on the lips. We are pretty certain this machine will blow up with the same frustration we deaf people bear in trying to perform sense of the extremely limiting shapes on the mouth which form the so called art of lip-reading.
In addition to the examples given in your report,regarding words beginning with b, m and p, or there are many other words that look similar on the lips. These are some examples: t,d, n – town, and down,noun; ch, sh, and j – chew,shoe, Jew; q, or w – quell,well; f, v – anxiety, and veer. Some of the hidden sounds that come from the throat are: g,t, c, and ck,x, h, and l,r, s, and z,ing, ed. This is a sample of the difficulties faced daily by lip-readers which DEXperience calls “always calculate”, or as it is like doing a crossword without a pen to hand.
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Source: theguardian.com