Siri, Alexa, Cortana. Tech companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft brought the digital assistant to the people, but now Nokia is bringing a little of the same automated help to telcos.

On Friday, the Finnish company debuted the Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant, or MIKA for short, which it said is the first digital assistant designed specifically for use in the telecommunications industry.

According to Nokia, MIKA combines augmented intelligence with automated learning to provide assistance to skilled telecom workers. The company said MIKA can provide access to an “extensive” range of tools, documents, and data sources, including the Nokia AVA knowledge library to make recommendations based on similar issues seen in other networks around the world.

Nokia indicated MIKA could save engineers more than an hour of productive time every day.

“Finding the right information is a daily challenge for telco engineers tasked with boosting network quality,” Igor Leprince, head of Global Services at Nokia, 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 available as both a web interface and mobile agent, and is now available for customer trials.

Also on Friday, Nokia launched Predictive Repair, a service the company claimed “can predict hardware failures and recommend replacements up to 14 days in advance, with up to 95 percent accuracy” through the use of machine learning algorithms from Nokia Bell Labs. Nokia said the recommendations will help operators avoid unnecessary site visits, excessive inventory, wasted operations efforts, and false “No Fault Found” returns.

The service is available to operators that use Nokia 3G and 4G equipment, Nokia said.

Nokia Predictive Repair will be available for customer trials in March 2017.

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Filed Under: Infrastructure

 

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