Imagine, for a second, you relied on a standard office printer to print out weekly reports. Nowadays, even your run-of-the-mill printer has countless fancy features. And yet, come Friday, you shuffle over to the printer and push, by sheer force of habit, the same buttons in the same sequence to get the same result. Naturally, your report is never formatted exactly how you wanted (perhaps the margins are too narrow or the images are too dark), so you just accept the result because it would be too time-consuming to figure out how to get the thing to do exactly what you want it to. Nobody likes doing this type of tedious work, which is why it usually got passed off on me back when I was an intern: “Hey Hector, can you print this out for me, same as last week but just skip the images?” I couldn’t delegate this to somebody else, because the only thing lower in the hierarchy than me was, well, the printer. 🖨

But imagine how enjoyable my internship would’ve been if I could’ve talked to my printer. Nowadays, some smart printers can already handle basic voice commands, eliminating some of the inefficient button pushing. But what if these smart printers could take it a step further and carry on a context-sensitive conversation that accounts for changing needs? It might, for instance, make helpful suggestions like, “It looks like you’re just printing a quick draft, so should I make it black and white to save some ink?” This would make it more than just a useful tool, but an assistive agent. 💥