Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (pronounced /ˈkɜrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyel; 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.