Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Among Kurzweil’s many honors, he recently received the 2015 Technical Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in the field of music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds many honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.

Topics

• New Technologies
• Innovation
• Cybernetics
• Future Trends
• The Future of Humanity

Publications

• Spiritualities, Ethics, and Implications of Human Enhancement and Artificial Intelligence (2019)
• enschheit 2.0: Die Singularitat naht (2015)
• La Singolarita e Vicina (2013)
• La Singularidad Está Cerca (2012)
• How to Create a Mind (2012)
• Transcend (2009)
• The Intelligent Universe (2007)
• The Singularity is Near (2006)
• Fantastic Voyage (2004)
• Are We Spiritual Machines? (2001)
• The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999)
• The Age of Intelligent Machines (1992)

Awards

• 2015 Technical Grammy Award
• In 2011, Kurzweil was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council
• In 2009, The Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award
• In 2002, Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
• The 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize
• The 2000 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology
• The 1999 National Medal of Technology
• The 1998 “Inventor of the Year” Award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• The 1994 Dickson Prize in Science
• The 1990 “Engineer of the Year” Award from Design News
• The 1978 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery

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