Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system, and the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano (my personal favorite shown here).
I transcribed the ending of an interview he gave after his keynote at the Telecosm Conference in Lake Tahoe. You can hear the rest at
Podtech.net
'In 5 years computers will start to disappear as rectangular objects and be integrated into our clothing and our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina from eyeglasses creating virtual reality environments. We will use really effective natural language recognition and translation between us and our computers as our virtual world deeply integrates with our real world.'
His latest book is
Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
