According to popular belief, last year laid the groundwork for voice assistants. We saw Amazon Alexa being integrated into a variety of home products, and Google Assistant followed pursuit with its release. This year is expected to further witness an advent rise in assistants and now another widely recognized brand is looking to jump the gun with the release of its AI-powered virtual assistant. Get ready to welcome Nokia to the league!
Just a day post the release of its first-ever Android smartphone by Finnish hardware maker HMD Global, Nokia is again bagging headlines as a trademark filing sporting details of its virtual assistant have surfaced on the interwebs. And it surely has a pretty name – Viki, in opposition to the monotonous Google Assistant.
The existence of Nokia’s virtual assistant was initially spotted by GSMInfo.nl in a trademark filing submitted by the Finnish company to the European Union. The application for the protection of the trademark has been filed a few days ago and the document clearly states that the company is working on an intelligent voice-based AI assistant of its own. In the trademark filing, Viki has been described as under:
Software for the creation and monitoring of mobile and web asssistants working with digital knowledge and combining all data sources into a single chat and voice-based interface.
Alongside its impending arrival to the global smartphone ecosystem, the brand Nokia is also turning to voice-activated assistants to drive the development of its devices. The Finnish giant, very much like others, is looking to place Viki at the heart of its phone experience but there’s still very scarce info on the working of the same. There is also no info on the release timeline of its assistant and other smartphones.
In addition, Samsung has also realised the importance of baking an intelligent virtual assistant into the smartphone. Thus, towards the end of its explosive year, the Korean giant picked up next-gen virtual assistant platform Viv. This assistant has been developed by the creators of Siri and the company is now looking to integrate its services within its upcoming flagship release Galaxy S8 under the name Bixby.
