Word: kurzweil
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...Raymond Kurzweil has always been way ahead of his peers. When he was twelve years old and his junior high classmates were struggling with book reports, Kurzweil developed a computer software package that was distributed by IBM. At age 17 he won a Westinghouse Science Talent Search award for a computer program that could write music in the style of Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven...
...Today Kurzweil's peers are corporate giants like IBM and AT&T, and the competition is tougher. Yet the boy wonder, now 38, is still out in front. In 1982 his Waltham, Mass.-based company, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, developed the first computer capable of recognizing a substantial number of spoken words and transcribing them into printed text. Though its 1,000-word vocabulary was a dazzling breakthrough in the infant field of artificial intelligence, the machine had few practical applications because it was very slow, taking 2 1/2 minutes to print a single word. But Kurzweil is preparing to unveil...
Virtually every major computer firm is racing behind Kurzweil to develop similar machines because their potential uses are almost unlimited. Executives could write notes merely by speaking into the computers, and eventually robots equipped with the devices could respond to spoken commands, like Artoo-Detoo of Star Wars fame. Though the technology is expensive (Kurzweil's VoiceWriter will probably sell for $24,000), industry experts expect the market for speech-recognition machines to burgeon, from less than $100 million this year to $2 billion by 1990. Kurzweil's closest competitor appears to be IBM, which two weeks ago introduced...
...commercial possibilities of the advanced systems seem boundless. Kurzweil Applied Intelligence in Waltham, Mass., for example, is testing an automatic typewriter that will print out any of 10,000 spoken words. That development will come none too soon for James Ickes, 33, of Redondo Beach, Calif., who was paralyzed from the neck down in a football accident 14 years ago. Now he can use a voiceactivated computer to dial his telephone, operate a ham radio and compose his mail. He has even started writing his autobiography, dictating it one letter at a time. Cumbersome as this procedure is, Ickes...
...state that Telesensory Systems Inc. "hopes to produce a computer for the blind that will scan a printed page and turn it into speech" [May 14]. In fact, we already have such a machine for blind patrons. It is a Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM), which over 50 blind New Yorkers are using to read everything from science fiction to Wittgenstein...