Ray Kurzweil is the field of AI's longest-serving expert, the inventor of numerous world-changing technologies and the author of several best-selling books. The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity is Near (2005), in which he first predicted that computers would reach human level intelligence by 2029 and outlined his vision of the merging of human and artificial intelligence, have together inspired several major films, hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Many of his inventions, such as text and speech recognition, and vocal and musical synthesizers, have enabled breakthroughs in communication between humans and computers. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google, the recipient of the US National Medal of Technology and Innovation, one of the nation's highest honours, and a member of the US National Inventors Hall of Fame.