Japanese develop lip-reading phones

Scenes of Trigger Happy TV star Dominic Jolly shouting into his mobile may be a thing of the past if new lip-reading technology from Japan becomes mainstream.

Third-generation mobile pioneer NTT DoCoMo has just unveiled the technology, which the company said will allow people to mouth words rather than actually voice them.

Reported in this week's New Scientist magazine, the technology will see an end to the annoying sound of people talking loudly on their mobiles in public places.

"All [the speaker] has to do is mouth the words silently and the phone will convert them to text or speech," according to the magazine.

The mouthpiece contains sensors which decipher words from lip movements. Developers have got the phones to recognise vowels and are now working on consonants. The first handsets are expected in around five years' time.