Belfast startup Liopa has secured $1m in seed funding to commercialise and bring to market LipRead, billed as the first-ever Visual Speech Recognition platform to go online.

Liopa’s initial backers Techstart NI and QUBIS led the funding round, which brought in new investors AI Seed Fund, which supports startups that harness artificial intelligence to create tech solutions, and Co-Fund NI, which is managed by Clarendon Fund Managers.

The company is a spinoff from the Centre for Secure Information Technologies at Queen’s University, where ten years of research led to the LipRead platform. LipRead uses the camera on a smartphone or tablet to analyse lip movement and decipher words and phrases.

LipRead’s primary function will be improving the accuracy of commonly used voice-driven assistants (such as Siri, Cortana or Alexa) and voice activated applications in noisy environments such as vehicles, offices and factories. Other potential uses of the lip-reading technology, which will be multilingual, include:

• An aid for the hard of hearing via automated subtitling
• Word/phrase search in uploaded video
• Human-robotic interaction
• Preventing authentication fraud (aka anti-spoofing)

The team behind LipRead includes entrepreneurs Liam McQuillan and Richard McConnell and scientists Dr Darryl Stewart and Dr Fabian Campbell-West. McQuillan and McConnell have been involved in the creation of several NI tech startup companies that have successfully developed software products for the world market, while Stewart and Campbell-West are authorities in visual speech recognition and computer vision.

In Association with

“Voice is forecast to overtake the keyboard and mouse as the primary means of interacting with mobile and computing applications.  The big stumbling block, however, is the accuracy of current voice technologies in real world environments," said McQuillan. “Commands get misinterpreted frequently due to background noise. LipRead will augment current technologies and provide much-needed accuracy, thus ensuring the success of the ‘Voice UI’.”

Photo: Liam McQuillan (centre) with Richard McConnell (left) and Hal Wilson of techstart NI