Augmentation and Transcendence [T&S Interview]

As an inventor, the website kurzweilai.net notes that 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. Mr. Kurzweil was appointed Director of Engineering at Google, Inc., in December 2012. We interviewed Mr. Kurzweil via email in summer 2012.