Best Lip Reading App in 2026: 8 Free and Paid Options Compared

Yes, there are lip reading apps, but not the kind most people are hoping for. A few apps try to turn the lip movements in a video into text, and none of them does it reliably in a live conversation yet. What does work, for free, is an app that listens and captions speech as it happens. And if you want to read lips yourself, there are apps and a free website that teach it.

This page sorts the options into those three groups and compares eight of them. Every fact comes from the app's own store listing or website, checked on 13 September 2026 and linked below. Percify is not on the list, and the last section explains why.

These are what most people mean by a lip reading app: point it at a face, get text. The honest state in 2026 is that the technology works in research and in narrow uses, and the apps you can download are weak.

Lip Reading AI (Android)

Lip Reading AI ↗ by HG Mobile is the app you find when you search Google Play for lip reading. Its listing pitches it at medical staff, caregivers and noisy places, and says it turns lip movements into text. It is free to install with paid upgrades inside the app and has more than 10,000 downloads. On 13 September 2026 it was rated 1.1 out of 5 from 151 reviews, and its last update was on 25 June 2025. Try it if you are curious, but read the reviews before you pay for anything.

Read Their Lips (web)

Read Their Lips ↗, from Symphonic Labs, lets you upload a video, mark the face you want read and get a transcript back. You pay by the second of video: $20 for 300 seconds, $30 for 600 and $50 for 2,000. On 13 September 2026 the site said it was temporarily under construction, so check that it is back before you plan around it. It is the closest thing to a serious lip reading tool an individual can buy, and it is built for recorded clips, not for live conversation.

What happened to SRAVI

SRAVI, from the Belfast company Liopa, was a lip reading app for hospital patients who cannot speak, and it recognised a fixed set of essential phrases rather than free speech. It was never sold to individuals, and Liopa's shareholders voted to wind the company up on 8 April 2024 (The Irish News ↗). Older articles still recommend it.

Lip reading is hard for software for the same reason it is hard for people: much of speech does not show on the lips. P, b and m all close the lips the same way. F and v look alike. Sounds made at the back of the mouth, like k and g, barely show at all. A person fills the gaps from context, and a model has to guess. It also needs a clear, well lit face turned toward the camera; a beard, a mask or a side angle takes most of the signal away.

That is why every tool above works best on short, clear clips, and why a transcript from any of them should be read as a guess, not a record.

If you are deaf or hard of hearing and want to follow what people say, this is the group that works today. These apps use the microphone, not the camera, and turn speech into text as it is spoken. They need to hear the speaker, so they do nothing for a silent video, but in a conversation they are far more accurate than any lip reading app.

Live Transcribe (Android)

Live Transcribe & Sound Notifications ↗, made by Google, is free, with more than a billion downloads and a 3.9 rating from about 267,000 reviews. It captions the conversation around you, and it can make your phone or watch vibrate when your name is said or for sounds like a doorbell or a siren (Android ↗). It was last updated on 17 August 2026. For most Android users searching for a free lip reading app, this is the one to install.

Live Captions (iPhone)

Apple builds Live Captions ↗ into iPhone 11 and later. Turn it on under Settings, Accessibility, Live Captions, then choose Microphone to caption a conversation in the room, or iPhone Audio to caption a video, a podcast or a FaceTime call. It is free. Apple notes that it is not available in every language, country or region.

Ava

Ava ↗ is built for conversations with several people, and it labels who is speaking. The free plan covers captioned sessions of up to 40 minutes. The Community plan is $14.99 a month, or $9.99 a month billed yearly, for 3 hours of premium captions a month.

Otter.ai

Otter.ai ↗ is a meeting and interview transcriber. It often appears on lists of lip reading apps, but it only works from sound. The free Basic plan gives 300 minutes a month, up to 30 minutes per conversation, and Pro is $16.99 a month, or $8.33 a month billed yearly. It is good for meetings and lectures; with no audio it has nothing to transcribe.

Lipreading, also called speechreading, is a skill people learn, usually alongside hearing aids or captions. These two teach it.

Lip Reading Academy (Android)

Lip Reading Academy ↗ by Dong Digital works through six chapters: a foreword, consonants, vowels, numbers, words and phrases, covering more than 800 common words and about 400 common phrases. It is free to install with paid upgrades inside the app, rated 4.5 out of 5 from 333 reviews, with more than 10,000 downloads. It has not been updated since 9 January 2022, but lessons like these do not date.

Lipreading Practice (free website)

Lipreading Practice ↗ is a free site of video clips and written exercises: consonants, everyday phrases, words, numbers and longer passages. Its creator, Gloria McGregor, has retired and closed the blog, but the lessons are still online and free to anyone. It is written for people with hearing loss who cannot get to a lipreading class.

- You want to follow a conversation: Live Transcribe on Android or Live Captions on iPhone, both free. Ava if it is a group.

- You want a transcript of a meeting or a recording with sound: Otter.ai.

- You have a video with no sound and want to know what was said: Read Their Lips once it is back online, and treat the result as a guess.

- You want to learn to lipread: Lip Reading Academy or Lipreading Practice.

An earlier version of this page described Percify as a lip reading app. That was wrong, and we have rewritten the page: Percify does not read lips.

Percify does the reverse, lip sync. You give it a photo or a video of a face and a voice track, and it moves the lips to match the words, which is how people make talking avatar videos. If that is what brought you here, see the best AI lip sync apps compared. If you came to read lips, the options above are the ones to use.