Nokia introduces MIKA – A Digital Assistant for Telecom Operators and Engineers

While the proprietary digital assistants are being announced by the equipment makers, Nokia has launched its own digital assistant, called “MIKA” – Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant, that will help engineers and telecom operators answering them over voice commands.

Hold on! it’s not like Apple’s Siri, or Amazon’s Alexa, or Google Assistant, or even Microsoft’s Cortana. Though MIKA works in a likely manner via voice-activated commands, but answers with more technical knowledge to the engineering questions – instead of turning-on/off the apps in your smartphone, searching via Google or at most controlling your digital home.

Nokia’s MIKA digital assistant is powered by the proprietary Nokia AVA – a cognitive services platform that offers cloud-based intelligent analytics and heavy automation to deliver personalised services to the connected applications. This include robotics automation of alarm monitoring, LTE site rollout, configuration management and fault management.

With the use of Nokia AVA knowledge library of best practices of its projects around the world, MIKA features augmented intelligence along with automated learning and provides access to a huge set of tools, documents and data sources.

“Using the knowledge library MIKA can provide recommendations based on similar issues seen in other networks. MIKA is available via a web interface and mobile agent so that engineers can tap into its knowledge base, wherever they are.” – so unlike those consumer purpose Siri or Cortana, this assistant is intended to be used by engineers as Nokia has titled.

Nokia will demonstrate the MIKA digital assistant at Mobile World Congress 2017 – the largest mobile show to be held in Barcelona between Feb 27 and March 2. Nokia is making the MIKA digital assistant available for customer trials as a service.

In fact another VIKI digital assistant, which was spotted in trademark registration application by Nokia, might be in works. That probably could work for consumers in smartphones and might also use the AVA platform. But it’s unlikely to be officially announced sooner, so expect recent or upcoming Nokia Android smartphones by HMD to run Google’s Assistant anyway.