Nokia launches Mika digital assistant designed for telecom operators

Nokia has launched a customised digital assistant dubbed Mika that will provide voice-activated automated assistance to telecommunication operators. Mika would improve engineers' efficiency by providing them with faster access to critical information and reduce the time spent on searching for information.

It will be displayed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain which is being held from 27 February to 2 March. The digital assistant will be available through web interface and mobile agents.

Mika, which stands for Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant, is powered by Nokia Ava cognitive service.

It is the first digital assistant tailored for the telecom industry and has been designed to provide automated assistance. Nokia has claimed that the application of Mika could offer more than an hour of productivity time every day by providing engineers access to information through its interactive user interface.

Mika combines augmented intelligence with automated learning to provide access to an extensive range of tools, documents and data resources. It can provide recommendations based on issues seen in other networks, thanks to the knowledge library of Nokia Ava, which is a repository of practice gathered from Nokia projects.

Igor Leprince, the head of Global Services at Nokia, in a statement issued on 27 January said; "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."

Alongside Mika, Nokia has also introduced Predictive Repair – a service that could predict potential hardware failures and recommend replacement up to 14 days in advance. The service is available to operators using Nokia 3G and 4G equipment. It would be rolled out for customer trial starting March 2017.