[jerf]

"Also, is Kurzweil part of Google Brain or separate. He doesn't really have nay background in NLP does he?"

From Wikipedia: "Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (/ˈkɜːrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyl; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurism, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments.... Kurzweil was the principal inventor of... the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,[3] the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer,[4]... and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition."

He's been in the general space of NLP for quite a while.