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- Entrepreneurs/Innovation
- Inspirational
- Technology & Futurology
Ray Kurzweil
In the Beginining
In 1974, Ray started his first major enterprise, Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. (KCP), to pursue his interest in pattern recognition. Ray and his team created the first "omni font" (any font) Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This new technology became a solution in search of a problem. In addition to the omni-font OCR, Ray and his colleagues developed the first CCD flat-bed scanner and the first full text-to-speech synthesizer and combined these three technologies into the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind.
In 1978, Kurzweil Computer Products introduced a commercial version of the Kurzweil OCR, which was used by Lexis and Nexis to build their on-line legal and news information services. In 1980, Ray sold the company to Xerox.. Today, the OCR originally - now called Xerox TextBridge - continues as a market leader.
In 1984, Kurzweil Music introduced the Kurzweil 250, the first computer-based instrument that could realistically recreate the musical response of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments. Ray sold Kurzweil Music Systems to Young Chang, again it continues today as one of the market leaders in computer-based musical instruments, marketed in more than 40 countries.
Ray also started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (KAI) in 1982 to develop computer-based speech recognition. The company introduced the first commercially marketed, large- vocabulary speech-recognition system in 1987. == Kurzweil VoiceMed products (now called Kurzweil Clinical Reporter) allows doctors to create medical reports by talking with their computers. The Kurzweil systems are now used in ten percent of the emergency rooms in the United States and in many other medical specialties.
A fourth company
Ray started his fourth company, Kurzweil Educational Systems, in 1996. This company quickly became dominant in the print-to-speech reading technology field. In August 1998, Ray and his colleagues received the first $150,000 SAP/Stevie Wonder "Product of the Year" Vision Award for the Kurzweil 1000 Reading System.
In 1990, Ray's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was published by the MIT Press, and received the award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990 by the Association of American Publishers. The predictions in this book, which Ray wrote in 1988, included the emergence of the World Wide Web, the taking of the world chess championship by a computer by 1998, and the dominance of intelligent weapons in warfare. These and many others of Ray's predictions have proven to be quite accurate.
Best Selling Phenomenon
Ray's best-selling book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence extends Ray's prophetic blueprint to what George Gilder calls the "metamorphic moment" when computers exceed the full range of human intelligence, which Ray sees as only a few decades away. This book has been published in nine languages and achieved the #1 best selling book on Amazon.com in the categories of "Science" and "Artificial Intelligence."
Honours and Awards
Ray Kurzweil received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation, and was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventor Hall of Fame. He was named Honorary Chairman for Innovation of the White House Conference on Small Business by President Reagan in 1986 and has received honors from Presidents Clinton, Reagan and Johnson.
