Leon Furze sets aside the chatbot hype to show how the underlying components of AI—image recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and transformer language models—already power a growing suite of assistive technologies. He argues that genuine progress depends on lived-experience design, open standards and a focus on specific user needs, not generic “GPT in everything” solutions. By mapping near-future advances—offline multimodal models, speech-to-sign avatars, adaptive reading platforms and low-cost robotics—Furze invites educators and developers to steer AI toward accessibility rather than spectacle. The post Artificial Intelligence and Assistive Technologies: A Practical Guide appeared first on Leon Furze.