Nokia gets in on the voice UI game

Over the course of the last few months, we’ve seen numerous companies battle to perfect voice user interface (UI) offerings to capitalize on the digitally native consumers, and now Nokia is having a go.

While companies like Google and Amazon have focused their offerings on smart home applications as the wave of IoT sweeps the consumer markets, Nokia has introduced Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant (MIKA) for the time pressed telco engineer. The digital assistant will not only be able to respond to voice commands, but Nokia claims through using cognitive capabilities, it can also predict hardware problems.

“Finding the right information is a daily challenge for telco engineers tasked with boosting network quality,” said Igor Leprince, Head of Global Services at Nokia. “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.”

Although artificial intelligence does appear to be the buzzword of 2017, many will forget the technology is still very much in its infancy. The applications need to be designed for specific tasks, and Nokia now claim to have the first solution designed specifically for the telecoms industry. Alongside the voice commands, using a knowledge library MIKA can provide recommendations based on similar issues seen in other networks.

With these features, Nokia says MIKA could ‘give back’ more than one hour of productive time every day to engineers through recommendations, and also simplifying the process of finding information.

The promise of artificial intelligence and voice UI, neither of which are particularly new, has been to remove repetitive tasks, allowing an individual to concentrate on more critical and high value tasks. This is another small example of the incremental introduction of the technology.

Nokia has said it will be showcasing the technology at MWC next month, and we suspect this won’t be the only AI application on offer. Be prepared for a mountain of AI use cases and product launches over the next couple of weeks. By the end of February, you’ll be sick of the acronym.