AI · First steps
How to use AI on your phone, by voice and with photos
Install the official app, speak instead of typing and send photos of papers, signs and products. The phone has become the easiest way into AI.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
The phone is now the simplest way to use artificial intelligence. The best-known assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot) have apps for Android and iPhone, and several of them let you talk by voice, as on a call, and send a photo to ask about it: a note from your child's school, a sign in another language, a product label, an electricity bill. For people who struggle to type or to read long texts, this is the way in.
You don't need an expensive device. You need space for the app, an internet connection and a few minutes to learn how to ask.
Why AI is not a chatbot
When you talk to AI by voice, it becomes clear that it isn't the "press 1" robot. It understands loose sentences, starts over when you change your mind, explains it another way when you say you didn't understand.
In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you: of your eyes when you photograph something you can't read, of your voice when you need to talk to someone in another language, of your memory when you ask it to remember. In his words, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem."
Step by step today
- Download only from the official store (Google Play or the App Store) and check the name of the company responsible: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Microsoft. Copycat apps abound.
- Log in and adjust permissions. The app will ask for the microphone and camera. Allow them only if you'll use them, and remember you can turn them off later in your phone's settings.
- Try voice conversation. Look for the microphone or sound-wave icon. Speak normally, as you would to a person. Ask, for example:
I'm at the supermarket and I have 80 reais for the week. It's me and two
children. Help me put together a basic list, with breakfast,
lunch and dinner, prioritizing what stretches furthest.
- Use the camera to understand paperwork. Photograph a notice, a medicine leaflet, a bill or a contract (cover ID numbers first) and ask:
Explain this paper in simple language. What is it asking me to do,
what's the deadline and what happens if I do nothing?
- Translate conversations. When traveling, at work or with neighbors from another country, ask the AI to translate what you say and read the reply aloud.
- Create reminders and lists by speaking. After an appointment, a meeting or a class, say what you remember and ask for an organized summary:
I'm going to say everything I remember from today's meeting. Organize it into:
what was decided, what I need to do and by when.
- Save battery and data. Voice conversations and photo uploads use more data. On a prepaid plan, prefer using them on Wi-Fi.
- Teach someone in your family. Whoever learns by teaching learns twice. Parents and grandparents tend to get along very well with voice conversation.
How Bairo did it
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez arrived in Brazil in 2002, from Colombia, and knows what it is to live in a country whose language is not yet entirely your own. Perhaps that's why one of the fronts he founded, Xperienc, proposes an instant translator, Global Language, so that patients and health professionals can each speak in their own language.
The technical foundation of that story began at home. He says he spent six months in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, building with the tools of his own time. Out of that came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. What now fits in anyone's pocket is, for him, the same bridge: technology that reaches out to those who used to be left out.
Precautions
Your phone is always with you, and that calls for more care: don't photograph documents with numbers showing, don't leave the microphone on during other people's conversations, check in an official source what the AI says about deadlines and rights, use the explanation of a leaflet or a test result only to arrive better prepared at the doctor's, and remember that the tool can get a translation wrong or carry prejudices without noticing.