We give an overview of speechreading systems from the perspective of the face and gesture recognition community, paying particular attention to approaches to key design decisions and the benefits and drawbacks. We discuss the central issue of sensory integration -how much processing of the acoustic and the visual in-formation should go on before integration how should it be integrated. We describe several possible practical applications, and conclude with a list of important out-standing problems that seem amenable to attack using techniques developed in the face and gesture recognition community.