Patent US 7,869,578

A printer has voice recognition capabilities to transcribe a recorded voice message into printed text. The printer has a communication interface that is connected to a communication line for receiving a voice message. The printer also has an extended memory that stores the voice message, and a speech bank that stores speech patterns and vocabulary words. After the voice message is stored in the extended memory, a speech recognizer compares the voice message to the speech patterns and vocabulary words in the speech bank and translates the voice message into text data. The text data is stored into a print buffer, where the text data may be accessed by a central processing unit (CPU). The CPU controls a print mechanism that actually prints the text data.