People always list his accomplishments in this fashion. They state some things that he was "heavily involved in" which are impressive when they sound as if he alone created them in a vacuum.
The reality is a lot of different people were working on a lot of these same things, and it's not as if everyone agrees that Kurzweil was the first to accomplish most of these, or even that he indeed did accomplish them in a satisfactory manner.
Yes, the Kurzweil keyboard was very popular and groundbreaking, but "the first to sound just like pianos"? No. They did not sound "just like pianos." They sounded more like pianos than the keyboards that came before, and less like pianos than the ones that came after.
This is the problem with Kurzweil (and others like him), he paints himself as an iconoclastic, groundbreaking figure; standing alone among a sea of might-have-beens. But the reality is that he was just one of many people working in a field which has had a lot of impact in our lives, and which he likes to wax ecstatic about.
The reality is that his main job for the last 20 years has been making a litany of ridiculous predictions nearly non-stop and then when some of them hit anywhere close to the mark he and his supporters claim that he was visionary.
It's absurd and it annoys me to no end.