A Voice Activated Printer via HP Print & Google Home

Remember when Siri hit the market and people were fascinated that you could just talk to your phone and it’d spit it out a list of relevant answers? Well, tech just keeps progressing and the new wave of voice recognition technology has manifested in-home voice assistants aka “smart speakers” like, Amazon’s Echo which houses the virtual assistant Alexa and Google Home which is equipped with your very own Google Assistant.

These voice-controlled assistants can now help busy parents and folks make everything easier including instructing your at-home printer to print you a doc by requesting such out loud. Google Home has partnered with numerous devices and brands, letting you control your alarm system, air purifier system, your thermostat, and now an HP Printer with your voice.

With a simple declaration of “Hey Google, ask HP Printer to print a word search game” for the kids, you can carry on prepping dinner while a hard copy activity prints, so that your children stay busy and out of the kitchen. You don’t have to clean off your hands, search for an activity online and then manually select print! Sounds awesome, right?

Granted, this technology is still in its infancy with restrictions as to what documents you can command to print with your voice. Asking for a printed excel spreadsheet or a word doc isn’t happening just yet, although chances are the folks at HP and Google are working on this.

What you can print using this technology currently includes games like sudoku (including the level of difficulty you’d like i.e. hard, medium, easy), bingo cards and word searches. You can ask for Crayola colouring pages or for your Google Calendar to be printed. You can also print a one-column checklist to have a hard copy of your to-do list or grocery list. Print notebook paper, i.e. ruled lined paper and metric graph paper for your children’s homework assignments. And when you’re stressed, print an Art Therapy colouring page for yourself.

You will need to own a Google Home or Home Mini and have an internet connection.

Next, you’ll require an HP Printer and the HP Print App on your Android or iOS device.

Finally, you’ll need to connect your Google Home device to your printer. To do such, you’ll want to register your printer with Google Cloud Print here.

And then you’ll need the right commands like, “Hey Google, ask HP Printer to print my calendar for this month.” All of the commands are listed in HP Printer’s support section which can be found here.

Voice-activated printing is a reality and with printer manufacturers jumping on board, there is no doubt this technology will continue to progress in an effort to make our lives easier. Who would’ve thought hands-free printing could be yours, that you could say out loud that you need something printed and your printer would do it? Well, with Google Home and HP you can now print with your voice.