Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. 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 technology, 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 in 2017
Raymond Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in 2006
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition.
Computer and speech synthesizer housing used by Stephen Hawking in 1999
Fidelity Voice Chess Challenger (1979), the first talking chess computer
A speech synthesis kit produced by Bell System
Stephen Hawking was one of the most famous people to use a speech computer to communicate.
