Ray Kurzweil Net Worth

Raymond Kurzweil was born on the 12th February 1948, in Queens, New York City USA, and is a computer scientist, inventor, futurist and author, best known to the world for improving technology in areas such as text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition, optical character recognition (OCR), and other related fields.

Have you ever wondered how rich Ray Kurzweil is, as of late 2016? According to authoritative sources, it has been estimated that Ray`s net worth is as high as $27 million, an amount earned through his successful scientific career, including authoring a number of books – “The Age of Intelligent Machines” (1990), “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever” (2004), among others, the sales of which have also added to his net worth.

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Ray Kurzweil Net Worth $27 Million

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Ray is the son of Jewish parents, but secular, and who escaped from Austria to USA just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Since an early age, Ray was making up new things from parts of his various toys and old electronic gadgets. Little by little his skills improved, and when he was seven or eight years old he constructed a robotic puppet theater. In his teens Ray became interested in computers, and soon started building computing devices and statistical programs. While in high school Ray wrote his first computer program, which was able to analyze sound of classical composers and then make a song of its own based on the sounds it received; he won first prize at the International Science Fair for his invention. After high school, Ray enrolled at MIT, from which he graduated with a BSc degree in computer science and literature. During his college days, Ray continued to progress, and in his second year created the program Select College Consulting Program, which was used to compare thousands of different categories about colleges and students, and his answers on a college application adapted as a questionnaire. Thanks to the success of the program he soon sold it to Harcourt, Brace & World for $100,000, which only increased his net worth. Since then, his career has gone only upwards, and so has his net worth.

Ray has started several companies throughout his successful career, including Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc, which was responsible for developing one of the first omni-font optical character recognition systems, then Kurzweil Music Systems, which made some of the most popular synthesizers including Kurzweil K250, and was later sold as a whole company to Young Chang, a South Korean manufacturer of musical instruments. His next venture was Kurzweil Applied Intelligence or KAI, which the developed speech recognition program, Kurzweil Educational Systems, which saw the light of day in 1996, and was founded with the goal of developing a new pattern recognition program for children with disabilities such as dyslexia, blindness and other disabilities. He also started several other companies, such as Medical Learning Company, and a website KurzweilCyberArt.com, among many others, which successes only increased his net worth.

Most recently, Ray was hired by Google co-founder Larry Page, “to bring natural language understanding to Google”.

Thanks to his outstanding career, Ray has received numerous prestigious awards, including Dickson Prize in Science in 1994, National Medal of Technology in 1999, Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2000, and the Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award among many others.

Regarding his personal life, Ray has been married to Sonya Rosenwald Fenster since 1975 and the couple has two children. Ray is a part of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which is a cryonics company, and on his death he is to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, in the hope that future technology will allow him to be revived and his tissue repaired.

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