Artificial Intelligence

The artificial intelligence system - LipNet - watches video of a person speaking and matches the text to the movement of their mouths with 93% accuracy, the researchers said.

Automating the process could help millions, they suggested.

But experts said the system needed to be tested in real-life situations.

Lip-reading is a notoriously tricky business with professionals only able to decipher what someone is saying up to 60% of the time.

His was not the only voice warning of the dangers of AI - Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak also expressed their concerns about where the technology was heading - though Professor Hawking's was the most apocalyptic vision of a world where robots decide they don't need us any more.

What all of these prophets of AI doom wanted to do was to get the world thinking about where the science was heading - and make sure other voices joined the scientists in that debate.

In an interview with Wired Magazine, Obama spoke of redesigning the social compact and starting a conversation around fair wages. He cited teachers as being underpaid, and called for a reexamination of what we value, and what we'll pay for.

Last time, we heard about it when it detected a rare form of leukemia in a patient’s body and when it was used to drive a bus. Now, doctor IBM Watson is preparing for a Hollywood debut. The supercomputer IBM Watson was used to create the trailer of the 20th Century Fox horror movie Morgan.

One of its most useful jobs is a robot doctor that suggests evidence-based medical treatment for even rare problems found in the patient. And it is doing it very efficiently.

Recently, the Institute of Medical Science doctors at the University of Tokyo had to take the assistance of IBM Watson. A woman was suffering from leukemia and doctors were unable to think of a treatment for her because the implemented options weren’t effective.

The data, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, showed some tumours shrank by around a quarter.

The compound will now be taken into more advanced trials.

Scientists said we were now in an explosive stage of merging advances in computing with medicine.

Spotting every difference between a cancerous and a healthy cell is beyond even the brightest human minds.

So the US biotechnology company Berg has been feeding as much data as its scientists could measure on the biochemistry of cells into a supercomputer.