Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever

Ray Kurzweil
Kurzweil on or prior to July 5, 2005
Born	Raymond Kurzweil (1948-02-12) February 12, 1948 (age 69) Queens, New York City, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S.)
Occupation	Author, entrepreneur, futurist and inventor
Employer	Google Inc.
Spouse(s)	Sonya Rosenwald Kurzweil (1975–present)
Awards	Grace Murray Hopper Award (1978) National Medal of Technology (1999)
Website	Official website

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (/ˈkɜːrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyl; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. 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.