Kurzweil has developed a spinoff product, the Kurzweil 3000, to help those with dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder read and study independently. Petersburg) offering a similar product and only two firms offering add-on programs for Windows, Kurzweil Educational Systems claims to control 50% of the market. With only one rival (Freedom Scientific, based in St. "This application of artificial intelligence really excites me," says Kurzweil, now 57. The product sold so well that Kurzweil's company turned a profit its first year. The new program also lets users access web repositories and convert texts into mp3 audio files. The Kurzweil 1000 program, which runs on any computer equipped with a scanner, is a more advanced and significantly smaller version of the original reader, which was the size of a washing machine. It quickly developed a new software-based, print-to-speech technology for a new reader for the blind. So he founded Kurzweil Educational Systems in Bedford, Mass., in 1996. Instead, the restless, ebullient MIT-trained engineer and entrepreneur continues to create new products, through a venture that projects $15 million in sales for 2005.Īfter selling his Reading Machine to Xerox in 1980, Kurzweil grew frustrated by what he saw as the company's increasing emphasis on using the scanning and character-recognition technologies he had developed for purposes that had little to do with the blind. (FORTUNE Small Business) – He revolutionized the way that many blind people read when he invented a machine that scanned printed material and read it aloud, and when Ray Kurzweil sold the device to Xerox for $6 million, he could have retired and lived comfortably off the proceeds.
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