Ray Kurzweil got his start by inventing a
machine-reader for blind people, which he sold to Xerox in 1980.
Kurzweil's second company,
Kurzweil Applied Intelligent Systems, developed one of the first voice-recognition engines, capable of understanding discrete words and turning them into text or commands.
Kurzweil AI was rocked by an accounting fraud uncovered in 1994, resulting in prison sentences for the company's CEO and vice-president of sales. No charges were brought against
Kurzweil, who denied any
knowledge of wrongdoing. The company was sold in 1996 to Lernout & Hauspie. Today,
Kurzweil is again focusing on
computer systems to aid the disabled. His current venture,
Kurzweil Educational Systems, is developing a
reading machine for people with dyslexia and other reading and
learning disabilities--a group that numbers as many as 50 million Americans. BUSINESS WEEK correspondent Paul
C. Judge interviewed
Kurzweil in KESI's Waltham (Mass.) offices.
Q: You've been involved in speech recognition from an early stage. What are some of the key factors that are making speech systems more widely available? A: Kurzweil Applied Intelligent Systems was founded in 1982, with the goal of creating a voice-activated word processor. The grail has been very large vocabulary, speaker independence, and continuous speech. One thing that makes it possible today is Moore's Law. It's only been in the last six months that we've had PCs that can support the processing requirements of continuous speech. The next step now is to integrate natural-language understanding with continuous speech dictation. People don't want to say "open file" and "close file." They want to say, "Get me the current letter to engineering." It's awkward to go back and forth between different modalities.
At the time, I had a blind guy who was head of international sales. He traveled all over the world on business for us, but he was limited to reading documents in Braille. But doing print-to-speech opened up any printed document to him.
