Frustrated that his invention wasn't used for the purpose he originally envisioned, Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Educational Systems in 1996 and developed a new and even better print-to-speech reader for the blind.  According to an interesting profile in Fortune FSB this month, the company is fulfilling its promise, closing in on $15 million in sales of its reader that includes a scanner and software for personal computers.  It is doing well by doing good, making a huge difference in the lives of the blind people it serves.  That's the good news.

At the same time he was building a better reader for the blind, Kurzweil had another company, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, that was building the first commercial large-vocabulary speech recognition system, the Kurzweil Voice Report.  In 1997 he sold the company to Lernout & Hauspie, a hot dot-com-era company committed to making voice recognition as common as the TV remote.  But now the bad news.  When the dot-com bubble went bust, so did L&H, which filed for bankruptcy.  ScanSoft acquired the company's assets at a fire-sale price and announced it would use the voice recognition technology originally developed by Kurzweil to add dictation capability to its office automation products.  Alas, no mention of my futuristic eyeglasses or any other helpful consumer products for the hearing impaired.

But now we end on the good news again: Kurzweil has announced that with the success of the new Kurzweil Educational Systems reader for the blind, he will turn his amazing inventive mind to other products for the disabled -- you guessed it -- captioning systems for the hearing impaired.  According to FSB, "By 2010, he envisions pocket-sized reading machines as well as tiny gadgets that will translate spoken words to text for the hearing impaired -- essentially providing subtitiles for the world."  You can bet that if Kurzweil gets a hand-held real-time captioning system to market by 2010, he won't be able to resist the challenge of coming up with ever smaller and better versions until he can integrate it right into my eyeglasses as well.  So there may be a happy ending yet.

Let's not get our hopes up right away.  Remember, Alexander Graham Bell decided to invent the telephone because he wanted to use technology to help his hearing-impaired mother hear better.  Bell's invention created a multi-billion global industry and made him rich.  But what about his mom?  What modern device still gives more fits than any other to hard-of-hearing people?  What device that is an absolute necessity for success in our global information society constantly fails to measure up to the needs of hearing-impaired people for good amplification and signal clarity?  That's right: the telephone.  Sorry, Mom.  But Alexander Graham Bell continued as a tireless hearing advocate throughout his life, using profits from his invention to set up schools, libraries and associations for the deaf.  And Ray Kurzweil has already shown he'll be just as dogged in pursuing his own visions.  When he insisted that his Reading Machine for the blind actually should get into the hands of blind people, Kurzweil defied commercial logic and convention, not to mention a big, powerful company like Xerox.  I'm betting he'll do it again with products for the deaf and hard of hearing.