Nokia Beta Labs today released Nokia Bots, a collection of 'mini-utilities' which monitor how you use your phone and try to improve your user experience either by making suggestions or automatically changing configurations. Or as Nokia puts it 'add-ons that make daily routines easier by learning from your behavior'. Nokia Bots, which runs as a homescreen widget, is available for the Nokia N97 and N97 mini from Beta Labs. Read on for further information and screenshots. 

All of the bots require varying amounts of time to learn your behaviour, so to get the most out of them you will need to install the application, active it (by putting it in one of the slots on your homescreen), and leave it running for a few days.

Alarm bot learns what time you usually wake up and suggests both an appropriate alarm and profiles changes (e.g. it will suggest an alarm at a given time and it will set your profile to silent over night - if that's what you usually do).

Profile bot will automate profile changes while you are in meetings (using information from your calendar).

Shortcut bot tracks which applications you use and how frequently you use them; from the aggregate data it works out which four applications you use most frequently and places them as shortcuts on a homescreen widget. This is probably best used as a replacement for the existing shortcut bar(s). It is ideal for those, like me, who aren't very good at customising the shortcuts as their application usage patterns change.

Battery bot, monitors battery levels and will let you know if your battery needs to be charged overnight (i.e. avoiding the 'dead in the morning' syndrome. It will do this by putting a message 'up' on the homescreen. This let's you see, at a glance, whether you need to charge your phone.
 

You can see from the screenshots that Shortcut bot has picked up four of my most commonly
used applications: ViewRanger, Skype, Gravity and SreenSnap.

Effectively the Nokia Bots add a very basic level of intelligence to your phone's software. The idea that your phone can take decisions for you, based on the context of what you are doing or have done before, has long been a main-stay of future concepts, so it's great to see some of the basic ideas being introduced here in a practical and user friendly way. It is also a great way to automatically create a better user experience on your phone.

The usual caveats about running beta software on your phone apply and, as ever, the Beta Labs teams is keen to hear your feedback, reviews and ideas for improvements, which can be submitted via the Beta Labs website.
 

Nokia Bots video from Beta Labs