Nokia MIKA Digital Assistant Launched to Aid Telecom Operators

Just earlier this month, Nokia Android phones were tipped to get their personal digital assistant named 'Viki', but now Nokia has now launched its MIKA (acronym for Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant) digital assistant, which is unexpectedly different from what Viki was tipped to be. The company says that the digital assistant essentially helps telecom operators by providing them with critical information faster.

Nokia's MIKA is the first digital assistant that has been trained keeping telecom industry in mind and has been designed to offer voice-dictated automated assistance that saves time and enables operators to work on critical tasks instead, the company said in its release.

"MIKA - powered by the Nokia AVA cognitive services platform and underpinned by Nokia's services expertise - will provide voice-dictated automated assistance to reduce time spent searching information resources, enabling operators to focus on key business tasks without being distracted by the complexities of multi-technology network environments," the company said.

The company says that as per its analysis of working methods within a Network Operations Center, MIKA can 'give back' or free up more than one hour every day for engineers by providing them with access to information and recommendations through its interactive user interface.

"MIKA combines augmented intelligence with automated learning to provide access to an extensive range of tools, documents and data sources. These include the Nokia AVA knowledge library, a repository of best practice gathered from Nokia projects around the world," it said in the release.

The tool makes use of the knowledge library and provides recommendations based on similar issues that were seen in other networks as well. MIKA is available via a Web interface and mobile agent so that engineers can get access to into its knowledge base, wherever they are, it added.

"Finding the right information is a daily challenge for telco engineers tasked with boosting network quality. MIKA taps into the power of the Nokia AVA platform to provide quick and accurate answers, avoiding time wasted on fruitless searches. MIKA is customized to support the specific needs of telecoms, and can deliver recommendations based on experience from networks around the world," Igor Leprince, head of global services at Nokia, was quoted as saying in the release.

The MIKA digital assistant as a service is now available for customer trials and will further be demonstrated at MWC 2017 in Barcelona later next month.

Apart from the digital assistant, Nokia has also introduced its Predictive Repair service that aims to help operators in reducing costs and improving network quality by moving away from break-fix approaches to hardware maintenance.

As per company's claims, Predictive Repair service can predict hardware failures and recommend replacements up to 14 days in advance, with up to 95 percent accuracy. "These recommendations will allow operators to improve efficiency by avoiding unnecessary site visits, wasted operations efforts, excessive inventory, and false 'No Fault Found' returns," Nokia said in release. The service makes use of Nokia Bell Labs machine learning algorithms to predict failures and is available for operators that use Nokia's 3G and 4G equipment, the company said.

To remind our readers, post the acquisition of its devices and services business by Microsoft, Nokia was split into three companies - Nokia Networks (the telecommunications wing that just announced a takeover of Alcatel-Lucent), Here (the company's navigation, mapping, and location services subsidiary), and Nokia Technologies (the company responsible for licensing of Nokia's portfolio of patents and developing new products such as the Nokia N1 tablet and the Z Launcher).