HP has been working on bringing voice control to its printers, introducing Cortana and Google Assistant skills last year that let users tell their virtual assistants to print a variety of different documents for them. Now, as of this week, Alexa-enabled devices can also connect to HP home printers.
Alexa can follow through on a number of different commands. Users can ask her to print games like sudoku puzzles or bingo cards, their to-do or shopping lists, coloring pages and even graph paper, blank calendars or notebook paper. You can see instructions on how to set up your printer to connect with Alexa here.
The Cortana and Google Assistant skills allow for similar commands, though each assistant has capabilities that the others don’t. For example, you can use the Google Assistant to print your Google Calendar or Alexa to print your Amazon shopping list. The Google Assistant HP skill launched last May while the Cortanta skill became available in October.
Anneliese Olson, HP’s head of home printing, says that connecting printers with voice assistants is convenient and useful though in the future, HP printers will likely be responsive to voice commands on their own. “Integrating voice into the home printer is an undeniably useful application of the technology,” Olson said in a statement. “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.”
