Lip reading, emotion sensing, face biometrics vie for place in smart auto stack Your car may soon know when you’re tipsy, stressed, or just mouthing words into the wind. From Ford’s lip-reading patent to radar systems that sense your mood and (of course) biometric driver identification, the latest wave of automotive AI is turning vehicles into surprisingly perceptive co-pilots. Ford publishes patent for in-car lip reading Vehicle voice control systems have been around for a while – but soon, they may be able to listen in on our most secretive conversations. Ford has filed a patent application for software that reads the occupant’s lips using cameras and sensors inside the vehicle. The feature would not be used for lip-based biometric authentication. Instead, the automaker says the vehicle would turn on lip reading in situations where normal voice controls do not work due to wind or other noise, for example, while driving in a convertible with the top down. Aside from lip movement captured by cameras, the system could also rely on acoustic signals: the vehicle could emit inaudible sound waves and analyze the echoes bouncing back from the user’s lips and mouth with the help of machine learning. “The captured video and sensor data are processed using machine learning algorithms that are trained on large datasets of lip movements and corresponding speech to learn the patterns and nuances of lip reading,” says patent 20260095520, recently published by the USPTO. The patent also predicts the use of gesture- and facial-expression-detection software to determine whether the user is having difficulty interacting with the system. Nodding the head could be interpreted as acknowledging a verbal interaction with the vehicle, while shaking the head or appearing confused would lead the system to believe that the user is having difficulties. The vehicle could then choose