The need for globally reliable voice chat

As a social networking platform with an experience based solely around voice chat, FRNZ’s ability to guarantee rich audio quality anywhere in the world is of top priority. However, the company’s global ambitions was at odds with its incumbent WebRTC solution. While delivered by a leading WebRTC vendor in Korea, it fell short in providing the desired stability for the app in other countries where FRNZ has plans to expand.

Consequently, to have a presence in geographies like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Turkey and get users to adopt the app as their favorite social platform, FRNZ needed to find a solution that ensured reliable live connections regardless of the local network conditions.

FRNZ also needed a solution that would allow them to be highly agile and responsive to user demands amidst stiff competition. To achieve these goals, FRNZ needed a plug-and-play voice chat and messaging solution, rich in capabilities and highly flexible. The solution had to allow FRNZ app developers to launch exciting new features quickly while minimizing development costs. The FRNZ team found just what they needed in a voice and messaging solution with Agora.

Challenges in guaranteeing a rich and engaging voice chat experience:

High dependency on local network conditions in South East Asia

Long call connect times – Complex integration

Lack of scalability

High quality audio, a global network, and low-code customization

With their years of experience, the Agora RTC engineers immediately understood FRNZ’s business problem and recommended Agora’s Voice SDK as a remedy.

What differentiates Agora’s voice RTC solution from the competition is the network performance. Agora’s Software-Defined Real-Time Network (SD-RTN™), is the world’s most advanced RTC network dedicated to voice, video, and live streaming. This AI-powered network, designed to help customers bypass the limitations of the local network infrastructures, is highly scalable and efficient. It allows FRNZ services to be seamlessly available even in countries with less-than-ideal internet connectivity. The combination of Agora’s SD-RTN™ and advanced audio codecs provides crystal-clear audio performance, even in network environments with up to 80% packet loss.

Besides resolving FRNZ’s pain points from networking and availability standpoints, Agora also helped enrich the app’s capabilities with AI-powered noise cancellation capabilities, intelligently eliminating echoes and suppressing background noises. Agora also notably expands the left and right stereo channels to provide a comprehensive surround-sound experience and users can now access a host of special effects, from sound mixing to sound reverb.

Finally, as a highly flexible solution, the Agora Voice SDK made it easy for FRNZ developers to add new features to the app with just a few lines of code rather than undergoing long and complex development cycles. This is exactly why FRNZ decided to implement Agora’s Chat SDK as it expands its platform to include messaging.

Agora Products

Voice Calling

Chat

Why FRNZ chose Agora:

Highly stable and crisp global voice chat

Low-code and easy customization

AI-enabled audio enhancements

Boosting app downloads and usage with a better voice chat experience

The integration of Agora boosted the performance of the FRNZ app. It helped in its commitment to deliver a seamless voice chat experience that is enjoyable enough for strangers to become friends. Since the updated app has gone live, it has registered exponential popularity and user base growth.

In the months following the rollout of FRNZ with Agora, the total app downloads reached 1.6 million. Among them, 10% of users were from Korea, and the remaining 90% were international, indicating that FRNZ is achieving its goal of providing an engaging voice chat experience for users across the globe.

Additionally, FRNZ’s monthly active user (MAU) numbers reached 200,000 for the first time after implementing Agora, and the daily live voice chat matching crossed 30,000 in just over two months after the update. To date, FRNZ has brought together over five million people worldwide in live voice and broadcasting sessions, and the number is constantly increasing!

Impressed by the business impacts of Agora’s Voice SDK, FRNZ soon expressed interest in integrating Agora’s Real-Time Transcription (speech to text) functionality into the platform to allow users from diverse linguistic backgrounds to communicate effortlessly.

Results after implementing Agora: