Computing Legend Ray Kurzweil to Join Google

Ray Kurzweil will join Google on Monday as director of engineering.

He will focus on projects involving machine learning and language processing.

Kurzweil has a substantial resume working on similar projects. While perhaps best known for his book The Singlularity Is Near, he pioneered print-to-speech reading for the blind, the text-to-speech synthesizers and large-vocabulary speech recognition software.

Kurzweil received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton.

“In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic.