company to Harcourt, Brace & World for 0,000 (roughly 0,000 in 2006 dollars) plus royalties. He earned a BS in Computer Science and Literature in 1970 from MIT.
In 1974, Kurzweil started the company Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologieshe CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Under his direction, development of these technologies was completed, and on