Ray Kurzweil is the principal developer of the world’s:

First Print-to-Speech Reading Machine for the Blind (the “Kurzweil Reading Machine”) in 1976. In 1998, the Kurzweil 1000 (from Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc.), won the first $150,000 SAP/Stevie Wonder Vision Award for Product of the Year.

First Omni-Font (i.e., “any” font) Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in 1976. Today, the latest generation of the original Kurzweil OCR is called Xerox TextBridge, a worldwide market leader, which has been in continuous development for 31 years.

First CCD (Charge Coupled Device) Flat Bed Scanner in 1975. Today CCD flat bed scanners are a multi-billion-dollar industry.

First Text-to-Speech Synthesizer in 1975. Text-to-speech technology is also a large industry today.

First Music Synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments> in 1984. Today, Kurzweil Music synthesizers continue as a market and technology leader, marketed in 45 countries.

First Commercially Marketed Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition> in 1987. Today, the latest version continues as a market leader.

Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, and other areas of artificial intelligence.  All of these technologies continue today as market leaders in their respective industries, several of which (the OCR, music and speech synthesis, reading technology, speech recognition industries) Ray Kurzweil pioneered. Ray’s web site KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.

Ray has written five books:

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking Press, 2005). This book expands upon the ever accelerating rate of technological change and examines the union of human and machine.

Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Rodale Books, 2004), coauthored with Terry Grossman, M.D. This book describes the science behind radical life extension.

The Age of Intelligent Machines(MIT Press, 1990), named “Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990” by the Association of American Publishers. Successful predictions made by Ray in this book include the emergence of the World Wide Web, the taking of the world chess championship by a computer by 1998, and many others.

The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life, How to Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease and Cancer (Crown, 1993).

The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Viking, 1999). Ray’s best-selling book extends his blueprint to what George Gilder calls the “metamorphic moment” when computers exceed the full range of human intelligence. This book has been published in nine languages and achieved the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in the categories of “Science” and “Artificial Intelligence”.

Ray Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office, in September 2002.  He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation’s largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has also received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University’s top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and international film awards.