Talk at your phone without actually saying anything, so the general public can't hear you.
You could use this to activate functions like, "Open unread emails" and "New email to Bubba tab tab Bubba what do you think about Lipreading Phone"....
The issues of background noise would go away because it would use images rather than sound, granted the technology may struggle a little but facial recognition is getting better and better, and the smile detection is being built into cameras everywhere so why not extend this to read lips? I think Intel did some software on this a while back.
While listening to a program about typewriters & and a recently released mobile phone that uses a camera to watch your eyes to prevent it going to autokeylock mode, this would make mobile phones much faster at texting and emailing, and allow pretty much real time instant messaging. This could be used on more powerful tablets to replace the keyboard.
As a by product it would finally allow us all to look like mumbling weirdos, mouthing stories to our selves.-- PainOCommonSense, Jun 15 2012 The reverse lipreading phone... http://www.engadget...-lip-reading-phone/Not exactly what I meant, here is the polar opposite of the Lipreading phone [PainOCommonSense, Jun 15 2012] A lot of lipreading depends on context to make educated guesses about what is being said. The concept might be useful, but likely only to improve the quality of vocal dictation.-- ytk, Jun 15 2012 I have corrected my original typo (something that wouldn't have happened on a lipreading phone).
Oh alright it would have happened and yes it would probably be about +/-50% worse than typing.
It would probably look like "Baboon Tabular Baboon Why You La breeding".-- PainOCommonSense, Jun 15 2012 You could mouth your message into the telephone’s camera, and then the video clip would be sent as an attachment to the recipient, who would open their incoming message to hear nothing and see nothing but your lips moving.-- pocmloc, Jun 15 2012 Anyone else with such a phone could simply point its camera at you. Its own lipreading app would then determine what you are saying, for that other person.-- Vernon, Jun 15 2012 Umm ... there are these things called SMS and IRC and email and stuff if you don't want to actually speak ...-- 8th of 7, Jun 15 2012 random, halfbakery