Nokia’s MIKA digital assistant is for the telecom industry which is a little bit of a departure from what’s been done with digital assistants up til now. Most of what’s on offer, or rather all of what’s on offer, was designed and developed with the consumers in mind. Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa software, and even Samsung’s upcoming Bixby are all aimed at consumers, placing the assistants in their everyday use devices like smartphones, and even smart speakers that sit in the home and interact with your other connected products, giving you hands-free interaction for anything from ordering pizza to letting you know what your schedule is for the day.
Nokia wants to make things easier for telecommunications operators with MIKA, but not necessarily in the way that consumer-based products do. Where as something like Alexa inside of the Amazon Echo helps to make things more convenient, like with turning the lights off by voice, a big part of MIKA’s capability is going to helping free up “highly skilled workers” so as to leave them open to take care of more pressing matters. Essentially, the idea is to help telecommunications operators be more productive, and according to Nokia’s testing they state that MIKA would be able to increase productivity time for workers who use by about an hour which would let them get more done during the day.
Nokia says that MIKA uses a couple of different kinds of technology to give it the functionality that it has. It utilizes what’s called Augmented Intelligence as well as automated learning. Using MIKA, telecommunications operators are able to tap into all sorts of tools that they may need for their tasks, including documents and other data that they may need. It also allows for access to various tools relevant to the job like Nokia’s AVA knowledge library. Nokia plans to demonstrate MIKA at Mobile World Congress next month, so attendees will get to see it in action, but they’re also already starting customer trials as of today for companies that may be interested in testing it out to see if it can help increase productivity of their workers.