Las Vegas, Nev. – Voice technology is impacting more and more industries, and printing is no exception. The past six months have seen manufacturers debut voice-assisted printing equipment that can communicate in natural language with press operators and other facility staff.

As a result, the new “Voice of the Press” Symposium was launched to help print business owners and others in the industry navigate the fast-changing world of voice technology and its increasing importance in print production. The inaugural event will take place in—where else?—Las Vegas on June 6.

“Whether it’s ‘Press, I need 5,000 copies, 4/0, 8½ x 11’ or ‘Digital Printing Unit 5, I need 25 variable post cards,’ or ‘Print MIS, How much money am I losing on this job?’ we are talking to our equipment more and more—and it’s talking back to us,” said Ted Talk, President of Talk Media, the organizer of the Voice of the Press Symposium. “Despite the fact that press manufacturers have in fact given their press’ voice assistants human names—like Johann, Aldus, and Bambi—very few print operators actually use those names,” he added. “It gets hard to anthropomorphize a big piece of equipment, so they’re quite happy using the default voice activator ‘Press’ or the like. We even have one older press operator who prefers ‘Mr. Press.’ Go figure.”

As an indication of how far voice-tech has come, the Voice of the Press Symposium will feature the special panel discussion “Presses on Printing,” in which four of the most recent voice-enabled units from Heidelberg, manroland, HP, and Canon Solutions America will talk about print production from the perspective of he equipment itself. An all-machine panel discussion is a first for an industry event. “Well, aside from that one time we had a panel of economists,” said Talk.

Talk has felt that for all these decades, an important voice was left out of conversations about print production. “No one had ever actually asked the press itself about workflow or production,” he said. “Or if they did, the press could never actually speak for itself. Now it can. We should listen to what it has to say.”

Still, voice-tech is a new technology in general, particularly in the printing industry, so getting the presses to converse in the context of a panel discussion was not without its challenges.

“With any AI [artificial intelligence], there is some degree of ‘training’ involved,” said Talk. “Getting the machines to avoid lurid profanity when talking about their human press operators posed some problems. And the one unit that kept bellowing ‘Death to all humans!’ needed some special coaching. Still, we’ve had human panelists who had similar issues when placed in a public forum, so we’re used to these problems.”

Register for “The Voice of the Press” Symposium by standing in any public location and shouting, “Register me for ‘Voice of the Press!’”

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