WTF?! Tech firms these days are more than eager to incorporate AI into everything, whether it's needed and wanted or not. Even the humble printing process is getting caught in the AI hype as HP tries to turn its printers into chatbot-operated machines. It's madness!
HP recently introduced a new AI chatbot for printers, meaning to bring "intelligent features" that make printing more manageable for users. The company touts that its HP Print AI is the industry's first intelligent print experience, with features designed to make printing frictionless and less challenging.
Corporate marketing-speak aside, HP trained its new AI chatbot to manage the entire printing process. The company that tried to put online-only DRM restrictions into its printers now wants to transform the printing experience, making it easier and more intuitive, as if hitting print is not simple enough. This new "standard for printing" will also keep user data protected and private while on remote cloud servers, the company says, as everyone raises their eyebrows.
To be fair, the chatbot will provide several AI functions and it does to have some cool features. Starting with Perfect Output, which is currently available as a beta to select customers, it can set the perfect printing layout for content that wasn't necessarily designed to be printed, for example web pages, as it can detect unwanted elements like ads and irrelevant text and remove them from the main content.
The printing giant says that with Perfect Output customers can be less "frustrated" when trying to put how-to guides, travel documents, online articles, or recipes on paper. The feature can also do wonders for printing spreadsheets, which is yet another typically troublesome task many offices face.
The Print AI experience can proactively create a "printable spreadsheet," without splitting tables and charts across different pages. It can also simplify support by providing specific instructions to quickly install and configure a new printer in natural language interactions.
HP's investment in machine learning goes beyond the Print AI chatbot, as the company is also working on a cloud-based solution to improve and enhance the enterprise scanning process called 'Scan AI Enhanced'.