Biography: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an American 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 is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Description above from the Wikipedia article Ray Kurzweil, licensed under CC-BY-SA,full list of contributors on Wikipedia.