Do you know these faces… well most of us would immediately recognize Great Richard Wright from Pink Floyd playing a Kurzweil, but do we know the other gentleman???… He is none other than Mr. Ray KURZWEIL himself, the significance of this post is not just a normal recognition given the fact that he invented this legendary out of the world sounding Synths which gave the canvas of sound to PINK FLOYD.

Ray Kurzweil is not just a Synth Keyboard inventor, He was the principal inventor of the first charge-coupled device flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

He is a renowned futurist, 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, 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. He is also author of over 7 BOOKS!

Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States’ highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001, the world’s largest for innovation. And in 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received twenty honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Kurzweil has been described as a “restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among the “most fascinating” entrepreneurs in the United States and called him “Edison’s rightful heir”.

InsigniaHiFi salutes him for all he did, created and yet to create!

PS: Thanks to Ankur Nehru for drawing my attention to this Legancy!