Ray Kurzweil has been honored for creating the first commercially marketed
large-vocabulary speech-recognition system in 1987. It was done under his Kurzweil
Applied Intelligence (KAI) company, founded in 1982. Today, descendants of Kurzweil’s
advances in speech recognition are used to create written documents for lawyers,
doctors, and other professionals and in automated phone response systems. KAI
is now part of Nuance. Kurzweil also has created several other companies:
- Financial Accelerating Transactions–Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies
(FAT KAT) applies pattern recognition technology to stock market picking,
in essence creating a computerized financial analyst.
- KurzweilCyberArt.com provides software like AARON and Ray Kurzweil’s
Cybernetic Poet to assist with the artistic process.
- KurzweilAI.net is a leading Web resource for advanced technologies, including
artificial intelligence. The site has hundreds of thousands of readers
- Kurzweil Educational Systems (KES), which develops reading systems for
the blind and dyslexic, is now part of Cambium Learning. KES currently is
distributing Kurzweil’s new portable reader.
KES developed the Kurzweil 1000, a print-to-speech reading system for the
blind that won the 1998 Stevie Wonder Vision Award for Product of the Year.
With the $150,000 award, placed in the Kurzweil Foundation, the inventor began
giving scholarships to blind students. This July, 30 blind college students
received cash scholarships, the Kurzweil National Federation of the Blind (pocket)
Reader, and the desk-based Kurzweil 1000 reader.
Kurzweil also is supporting scientists like Rob Freitas with research grants
for nanotechnology—one of the areas where he expects breakthroughs that
will eliminate our dependence on foreign oil for energy.