The other day Alexa informed me that my Brother printer was getting low on black ink and would I like to order some more. Strange. I have ordered ink for this printer from Amazon, but I hadn't done anything to setup any smart features between the printer and Alexa.

The Brother printer is a smart A3 printer which is networked and supports everything you can think of, but I'd only ever set it up for smartphone printing and computers on the network. But I checked in the Alexa app and sure enough a Brother skill was installed and it could report ink levels and alert Amazon that it was getting low, find replacement genuine ink and ask me if I wanted to order it.

As I never set this up I can only assume the printer and Alexa did it automatically. The printer regularly checks for firmware updates and updates itself, so that might have been a new feature/addition. But I never shared my Amazon login with the printer, so I guessing it was Alexa discovering new devices on my network and automatically adding them. But also setting up a skill for them is a new one on me.

I have noticed all of my smart devices are now listed in Alexa, whereas before is was only ever devices you manually added. It is far easier these days to add a device and they tend to just work these days. Sometimes in the early days on Alexa you had to fight it and the other device's setup to get them working. But I'm not sure I like the idea that it will now just auto add and setup everything it finds on the same network.

Whilst this is a very nice feature for Alexa to create a notification that the ink level is getting low, and I'm happy to leave it working, it does raise the question about automation assuming you want it setup. Until now devices have normally asked if you want a feature activated, or you have had to manually switch it on or install it. Just because a device has smart features built in, I might not always want to use them.

And there is the security aspect.
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