Ray Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948, in Queens, New York) is an American computer scientist, inventor and futurist who currently works at Google on machine learning and language processing. He developed the Kurzweil Reading Machine in 1976, an early device combining optical character recognition and text-to-speech synthesis to read printed text aloud for blind users, and the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer in 1984. He received the National Medal of Technology in 1999, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2001, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. He is also known for writing about technological acceleration and artificial intelligence in books including The Singularity Is Near.