Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ray Kurzweil is best known for inventing the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first device to use omni-font optical character recognition combined with text-to-speech synthesis to read printed text aloud for blind users. He also invented the Kurzweil K250 synthesizer, which could imitate a range of traditional musical instruments, and received a Technical Grammy Award for it in 2015.
Google co-founder Larry Page personally hired Kurzweil in December 2012 for a full-time position focused on machine learning and language processing. The agreed job description was a single sentence: to bring natural language understanding to Google.
The Law of Accelerating Returns, which Kurzweil proposed in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, holds that the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems, including the growth of technologies, tends to increase exponentially. His 2001 essay extended the idea into an argument for a technological singularity, drawing on John von Neumann's earlier concept.
In a 2010 self-assessment of 147 predictions, Kurzweil claimed 115 were entirely correct and 12 essentially correct, putting his claimed accuracy rate at 86%. Critics disputed this; Forbes and Newsweek both identified several predictions for 2009 that did not come true, including that continuous speech recognition would create the majority of text.
Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Bill Clinton, the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2001, the 1978 Grace Murray Hopper Award, and a Technical Grammy Award on the 8th of February 2015 for the Kurzweil K250. He also won first place at the 1965 International Science Fair and has received more than 20 honorary doctorates.
Stevie Wonder became the first user of a production Kurzweil Reading Machine after hearing about the device on The Today Show following its unveiling on the 13th of January 1976. Wonder's 1982 conversation with Kurzweil about the limitations of electronic synthesizers also directly inspired Kurzweil to found Kurzweil Music Systems and develop the K250.