Actually, the number of important inventions developed by Raymond Kurzweil (and later also by his team) is quite unbelievable: - "first computer program. Designed to process statistical data, the program was used by researchers at IBM" - "a sophisticated pattern-recognition software program that analyzed musical pieces of great classical music composers and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles" - " he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built." - "a computer program to match high school students with colleges" - "the first omni-font optical character recognition system--a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font" - "a reading machine for the blind, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them out loud. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologies--the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Under his direction, development of these new technologies was completed" - "a new generation of music synthesizers capable of accurately duplicating the sounds of real instruments" - "computer speech recognition systems for commercial use. The first product, which debuted in 1987, was the world's first large-vocabulary speech recognition program, allowing human users to dictate to their computers via microphone and then have the device transcribe their speech into written text. Later, the company combined the speech recognition technology with medical expert systems to create the Kurzweil VoiceMed (today called Clinical Reporter) line of products, which allow doctors to write medical reports by speaking to their computers instead of writing." - "new pattern-recognition-based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia and ADD in school. Products include the Kurzweil 1000 text-to-speech converter software program, which enables a computer to read electronic and scanned text aloud to blind or visually-impaired users, and the Kurzweil 3000 program, which is a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills." - "an interactive computer education program for doctors and a computer-simulated patient." - "Kurzweil started KurzweilCyberArt.com--a website featuring computer programs meant to assist the creative art process. The site offers free downloads of a program called AARON--a visual art synthesizer developed by Harold Cohen--and of "Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet", which automatically creates poetry." - "KurzweilAI.net, a website devoted towards showcasing news of scientific developments, publicizing the ideas of high-tech thinkers and critics alike, and promoting futurist-related discussion among the general population through the Mind-X forum." - " improve the performance of FatKat's A.I. investment software program, enhancing its ability to recognize patterns in "currency fluctuations and stock-ownership trends."" - "the "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" (K-NFB Reader)--a pocket-sized device consisting of a digital camera and computer unit. Like the Kurzweil Reading Machine of almost 30 years before, the K-NFB Reader is designed to aid blind people by reading written text out loud, only the newer machine is portable and collects texts through captured digital camera images while the older machine is very large and obtains all text through flatbed scanning." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil