Flip AssistantAbout
I built this for my own phone first. I carry a Kyocera flip phone, and I kept running into the same two or three moments where it left me stuck: standing in a field wondering whether the rain was going to hold off, trying to find out whether a supplier was still open, and needing a six digit code to sign in to something.
None of those needed a smartphone. They needed a way to ask a question without spelling it out on a keypad, and a way to read the answer on a small screen. So I wrote one, used it for a while, and kept adding the things I actually reached for. Everything here exists because I wanted it on my own phone, not because it looked good on a feature list.
Why a flip phone in the first place
People arrive at these phones for different reasons. Some want their attention back. Some want a phone that survives a work site. Some hold to a way of living where a device full of feeds does not belong. Some just want the battery to last a week.
What those have in common is a decision to leave something out on purpose. This app is meant to respect that decision, not chip away at it. It has no feed, no notifications, no badges, and nothing that runs while you are not using it.
You open it, get an answer, and close it. There is no second screen holding the things I could not fit, and nothing waiting to pull you back.
Let's talk about AI
Answering an arbitrary question means using an AI model. I would rather say that plainly on a page you can find than bury it in a footnote.
It is worth knowing how small a part of the app that is. The menu on the right is the whole thing, and most of what is on it never touches a model at all.
Plenty of people who choose a simple phone have real objections to AI, and I am not going to try to argue anybody out of them.
Some of those objections are about attention and dependence, some are about how the models were trained, some are about what these companies are doing with the world. Those are reasonable positions held by thoughtful people, and I would rather give you what you need to decide than talk you round.
Where AI is used, and where it is not
Most of what this app does involves no AI at all. It is worth seeing exactly where the line falls.
| What you are doing | What answers it | AI |
|---|---|---|
| Weather | National Weather Service | No |
| Two-factor codes | Arithmetic on the phone | No |
| Reading notes | The phone | No |
| A saved route | The phone | No |
| Scanning a QR code | The camera and a decoder | No |
| Directions | Mapping data and a routing engine | No |
| Speech to text | A speech recognition model | Yes |
| Asking a question | A language model, with a web search | Yes |
| Summarizing a link | A language model | Yes |
Speech to text applies anywhere you speak instead of typing: a question, a note, a destination, a zip code. If you never speak to it and never ask it anything, you have a weather station, an authenticator, a notepad and a map, and no model is involved at any point. Weather and the codes keep working even without a subscription.
Then why use it at all?
Two reasons, both practical rather than ideological.
The first is the keypad. Spelling out a sentence with number keys is slow enough that people give up, which is why most tools made for these phones go unused. Speech recognition is the only thing that makes asking a question realistic, and speech recognition is a model.
The second is that a question needs an answer. Searching the web on a 240 by 320 screen with no real browser is not workable. Something has to read the results and say the useful part in a sentence, and that is what a language model is genuinely good at.
What the app will never do
If it is not for you
That is a fair call, and I would rather you decide it from an honest page than find out later and feel misled. If the principle settles it, no hard feelings.
Why isn't this free?
I built this for myself first, and realized other people might find it useful too. The reason it costs anything is that every question, every transcription, and every set of directions goes through paid APIs that charge per request. There is no way around that without putting ads in the app or selling your data, and I will not do either.
About ninety cents of every dollar goes straight back to those costs. This is not a business designed to scale. It is a tool I use every day that pays for itself. The upside of paying for APIs directly is that there is no account with any provider that knows who you are. Your questions go through our service, not under your name.
Questions, disagreements, and bug reports all go to the same place: hello@flipassistant.app. A person reads them.
Judge it on use
Seven day free trial, no card required. If it turns out not to be for you, nothing happens and nothing is charged.
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