Computing & Telecoms award

Raymond Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist. He is a pioneer in the research and commercialization of optical character recognition (OCR), which is the mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-editable text; and speech recognition technology (also known as automatic speech recognition or computer speech recognition), which converts spoken words into machine-readable input.

In 1974, Kurzweil launched Kurzweil Computer Products and led development of the first omni-font OCR system, a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Prior to this work, scanners only had been able to read text written in a few fonts. In 1978, Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the OCR computer program. Two years later, Kurzweil sold the company to Xerox. The OCR software market has since grown to include several dozen vendors, including Microsoft.

In the 1980s, Kurzweil created Kurzweil Applied Intelligence to develop computer speech recognition systems for commercial use. The first product, launched in 1987, was the world's first large-vocabulary speech recognition program. It allowed users to dictate to their computers via microphone and then have the device transcribe their speech into written text. The company later combined speech recognition technology with medical expert systems to create the Kurzweil VoiceMed (now called Clinical Reporter) product line, which allows doctors to write medical reports by speaking instead of writing. The global market for advanced speech recognition in mobile handsets will increase from US$32.7 million in 2009 to US$99.6 million in 2014 according to a 2009 report by independent market analyst firm Datamonitor.

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the US$500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology. He continues to work on research in various areas of artificial intelligence.