14 DAY TRIAL // Although previous reports suggested Nokia would enter the digital assistant war with one of its own, it appears that the Finnish company has something completely different in mind.
If you don't recall, Nokia filed for a Viki trademark about three weeks ago, an application described as a “software for the creation and monitoring of mobile and web assistants working with digital knowledge and combining all data sources into a single chat and voice-based interface.”
We don't know if Viki is indeed Nokia's response to Cortana, Google Assistant or Siri, but we do know what the recently announced MIKA is.
Nokia announced today its new digital assistant for telecommunications operators, MIKA. Unexpectedly, this isn't aimed at consumers, but at carriers that want to improve their efficiency by providing engineers faster access to important information.
MIKA, or Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant, has been especially developed for the telecom industry, so it can provide automated assistance, which in return should save time and free other workers and make them available for other important tasks.
A new predictive service has been announced too
According to Nokia, using MIKA could “give back” engineers more than an hour of productive time every day by giving them access to information and advice via the interactive user interface.
The new digital assistant has been designed to combine augmented intelligence with automated learning, so it can provide access to a wide range of tools, documents and data sources.
Besides MIKA, the Finnish company also announced the Nokia Predictive Repair, a service that allows operators to reduce costs and improve network quality.
Nokia claims that the new service can predict hardware failures and recommend replacements up to 14 days in advance, with up to 95% accuracy.
MIKA will be available for customer trials, and it will be showcased and demoed at Nokia's booth at MWC 2017 between February 27 and March 2. On the other hand, the Nokia Predictive Repair will be available for customer trials in March 2017.