HP unveils voice assistant featured printers

In the new era of emerging voice assistants, one can find these assistants in almost anything. Starting from phones and tablets these assistants escalated to televisions, washing machines and refrigerators. At CES this year, we could see Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana becoming a part of the household in the tech industry. Now, HP recently brought its first voice assistant enabled Printer into this world of tech.

HP now becomes the first printer company to enable intuitive voice commands on leading smart speaker platforms, said the company in its blog post. HP believes the consumer printer market is ripe for voice integration, making it the first print hardware company to roll out voice support for its web-enabled printers via a skill for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana.

Users can interact with this voice assistant-enabled printer by asking things like print a copy, how much ink is left? , printing to-do list etc. The company plans to integrate Echo and Google Home into the printers in the future.

“Integrating voice into the home printer is an undeniably useful application of the technology,” says Anneliese Olson, general manager and global head of home printing at HP. “For busy families, the virtual assistant ecosystem makes a lot of sense and connecting a printer to it is a natural extension within the smart home.”

As printing isn’t any simple task like playing music or asking a weather forecast, it involves several tasks and settings. We need to wait and watch how this printer manages to do such tasks when it hits the market. Pricing and availability are yet to be known.