HMD launched a new Nokia phone, the Nokia 6 in China yesterday. The company’s new Android phone is arguably just like any other Android smartphone, which really isn’t anything new. The Nokia 6 is, of course, built by HMD which consists of a couple of execs from Microsoft Mobile and ex-Nokians. However, it only uses the “Nokia” brand name meaning that it isn’t built by the actual Nokia. Nevertheless, what’s interesting to see is that Nokia seems to be working on a new personal assistant to compete with Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant.
The company recently filed a trademark in the European Union for the name “Viki” which seems to be a virtual personal assistant for mobile devices. The trademark application actually reveals that Viki will be a software that combines digital knowledge from a variety of data sources into a “chat and voice-based interface.”
Software for the creation and monitoring of mobile and web digital asssistants working with knowledge and combining all data sources into a single chat and voice based interface.
There, of course, isn’t many details about Viki at the moment but it does seem like a clear competitor for Cortana and the other personal assistants in the market. Whether Viki will bring anything new to the market remains to be seen, but it’ll be quite interesting to see how Nokia distributes Viki considering the company doesn’t have any first-party smartphone as of writing this article. However, the company will most likely start bundling Viki with HMD’s Nokia branded smartphones if Viki is what we assumed it to be: a virtual personal assistant for smartphones just like Cortana or Siri.
It’s also important to note that Viki will likely use Microsoft’s Bing for its search capabilities as Google probably won’t allow them to use its service on Viki. Microsoft, on the other hand, does a pretty good job at this as the company already works with the likes of Apple and Amazon to bring Bing’s search capabilities to Siri and Alexa.
Image via Wired.
