A neighbor of mine still uses a flip phone by choice — he says he's never needed anything a smartphone does badly enough to deal with the battery life and the price tag. When he asked me if that meant AI was closed off to him, I understood the question, but the answer surprised him.
You don't need a smartphone to use most AI chatbots at all. If you have a computer — a desktop, a laptop, even an older one, at home or at a library — you can go to a website and type your question in, the exact same way you'd type an email. No app, no download, no phone required. The smartphone versions of these tools are convenient for using them on the go, but the actual tool lives on the internet, not inside a phone specifically.
My neighbor ended up using it from his desktop computer, the one he already uses for email and looking up recipes. He didn't change a single thing about his phone situation. He just opened a browser, went to the site, and started typing questions the same way he'd search something on a search engine, except the answers came back as actual conversation instead of a list of links to sort through.
If you do have a smartphone, even an older or basic one, most of these tools also work fine through the phone's regular web browser without installing anything extra, which is worth knowing if app stores and downloads feel like their own hurdle. The real requirement here is much smaller than people assume: some kind of internet connection and a screen to type into. That's the whole bar.
If you want the slow, no-jargon version of all this — the stuff I wish someone had handed me before I fumbled through it myself — that's exactly what I built On Ramp AI for. Check it out here.