Ray Kurzweil
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 Ray Kurzweil facts

• Aside from futurism, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments
• He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism
• Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology
• Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first charge-coupled device flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition
• Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony
• He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001, the world's largest for innovation
• And in 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U
• S
• Patent Office
• He has received twenty honorary doctorates, and honors from three U