Kurzweil received a Technical Grammy Award on February 8, 2015, specifically for his invention of the Kurzweil K250.

IBM's Deep Blue computer defeated World Champion Garry Kasparov in a well-publicized match.

Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device that allows blind people to understand text by having a computer read it to them aloud, was unveiled during a news conference headed by Kurzweil and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind.

Raymond Kurzweil was born on February 12, 1948, in Queens, New York City, U.S. He is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor known for his work in optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, and his predictions about the future of technology, particularly the technological singularity.