Shengwang X Yalla: Face-to-face is not as good as meeting online. How was the most preferred language chat room for young people in the Middle East “made”?

"The essence of real-time interaction is service, not function." This is a philosophy that Shengwang has always believed in.

After the function goes live, the service really starts. Every second or even every millisecond of real-time interaction needs to be stable and reliable. The reason why the majority of users can blacken the voice of friends with friends in many innovative applications, chat with the host anytime and anywhere, and interact with famous teachers thousands of miles away in real-time Q&A, etc., are all due to the closeness of the sound network with customers and developers. Carefully polished endlessly.

Based on this, we officially launched the [Seeing the Value of Technology] series of planning, focusing on innovative scenarios and excellent applications on a global scale, and sharing the technical value and stories behind the joint creation of Shengwang and customers.

[Seeing the value of technology] In the first issue of the article, we will talk about Yalla, a popular voice social platform in the Middle East.

With an average of more than 4 hours online every day, in the eyes of rich and time-rich Middle Easterners, "the longest chatting day, the most arrogant reward" is just the norm. The “face-to-face is not as good as online” online voice interactive social apps have emerged in recent years and are deeply loved by users in the Middle East. Among them, the voice social platform represented by Yalla has gradually become a "party house" for young people in the Middle East, discussing popular events , Sharing life, making friends, giving gifts... all can be easily achieved here.

Yalla Group was established in 2016 and successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange in just over 4 years. With deep insights into local customs and culture and unique product design, its products have long dominated the App Store and Google Play. Today, Yalla has become the largest voice social and entertainment platform in the Middle East and North Africa. According to the financial report, in the fourth quarter of 2020, the number of monthly active users of its voice social product Yalla reached 6.401 million, an increase of 94.8% year-on-year, and the number of paying users reached 1.103 million, an increase of 100.9% year-on-year.

Since the establishment of Yalla Group, Agora has provided stable, reliable, and highly concurrent real-time interactive solutions for Yalla, which has witnessed and accompanied Yalla Group's step-by-step growth until its listing in the United States in 2020.

users think is really good

The Internet industry in the Middle East can be said to be a relatively "barren land" from the outside world. What magic power does Yalla have in the Middle East and North Africa in just a few years, and it has become popular among users?

• local conditions, localization is the key: Yalla is a local company in the Middle East, which has a deeper insight into the customs and social characteristics of the Middle East, and a more accurate grasp of the habits of users in the region. Due to the special social culture in the Middle East, voice chat is more acceptable to users. So Yalla copied the daily life of the people in the Middle East and moved offline social entertainment activities online. In Yalla's chat room, users can interact in real time through voice chat, text, etc., which fits well with the popular "parliament" culture in the Arab region and the daily social habits of local users. In addition, based on the custom of giving gifts to each other when people in the Middle East participate in offline social activities, users can purchase gifts on the Yalla platform to give each other gifts to show their recognition and appreciation of each other.

• designed with heart, and the gameplay is rich: In the product design concept, Yalla's product interface is very simple and clear, showing great respect for the culture and user habits of the Middle East. In terms of interactive experience, there are no ads on the Yalla platform, which greatly improves the user experience. In addition to the basic chat room function, Yalla pays great attention to the construction of the community and added the "Moments" function. Users can choose to bring a wide range of exchanges and participation topics such as pets, food, favorite outdoor activities, and release status (similar to domestic Weibo topic), form a small circle with more like-minded people.

X Yalla: 0 to 6.4 million, 1800 days and nights to accompany

At present, Yalla’s chat room can accommodate up to 2,000 people, so it is important to ensure stable and smooth real-time communication between users.

1. Global high-quality network coverage, ultra-low latency to enjoy "immersive" voice interaction

For voice social products, real-time audio connection with microphones is a standard feature, and once the delay between users' connection with microphones is too high, there may be embarrassing scenes of unsynchronized communication content, resulting in greatly reduced user interaction experience. Yalla's users are centered on the Middle East and North Africa, radiating to more than 100 countries around the world. It is not easy to ensure that users from different regions can achieve stable and smooth real-time voice interaction anytime, anywhere.

The software-defined real-time network SD-RTN™ built by Agora provides strong support for solving the above problems. SD-RTN™ covers 200+ countries and regions, with features such as ultra-low latency, high concurrency, and high availability. It is especially optimized for small and medium-sized cities in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, North America and China. The global end-to-end network quality transmission rate exceeds 99%. In terms of network architecture design, it can cope with more than 10 times the load, with tens of millions of concurrency capabilities, and meet the high concurrency requirements of the language chat scene. The person in charge of Yalla's related business said: "After so many years of cooperation with Soundnet, they are indeed superior to other solutions in the industry in terms of ultra-low latency, weak network confrontation, stability, and full platform compatibility and interoperability."

Acoustic network Agora service covers 200+ regions, and the picture shows the location of Acoustic Network office

At the same time, the Shengnet SD-RTN™ network adopts an intelligent routing mechanism. All edge nodes periodically send test data packets to each other in seconds. Each edge node refreshes the latest network quality of the entire network every second and integrates packet loss. , Delay, jitter and other network indicators, select an optimal transmission path for real-time audio and video services, and directly transmit the content to the opposite end, greatly reducing the data transmission delay, so that the global end-to-end network delay is less than 400ms. The median time is 76ms. The ultra-low latency of less than 400ms creates more possibilities for voice real-time interactive scenes. Users can freely and smoothly get on and off the microphone, and the switching process has zero perception, which greatly improves the timeliness and enthusiasm of interaction in the live broadcast room.

2. Anti-weak network transmission and anti-packet loss algorithm, adapt to more than 20,000 mobile terminals

In view of the possible weak network transmission and packet loss in real-time voice interaction, Agora has a set of anti-weak network transmission and anti-packet loss algorithms. It has been adapted to more than 20,000 terminal devices and can achieve 70% packet loss. Smooth video calls and smooth voice calls with 80% packet loss ensure that Yalla's global users can enjoy a stable and smooth interactive experience even under extremely weak network conditions.

In the early on-site service, colleagues from the Agora technical team of Acoustic Networks witnessed and served the launch of each version of Yalla, and participated in the innovation and change of scenes. Because Yalla's users are mainly concentrated in the Middle East and North Africa, Agora's technology and services must be compatible with some local terminal equipment. Asong was one of the colleagues of the acoustic network's on-site technical team who served Yalla in the early days. When he talked about polishing technology with customers and jointly overcoming problems in the early on-site, he seemed to have more words to say. "In the early stage of the cooperation, Yalla will encounter some stand-alone problems. If we want to help customers quickly solve the problem, we can only get overseas equipment of the same model. Help customers solve problems within 1 day".

Relying on this attitude of "to the end of the problem and "today's problem is over", Agora helped Yalla build a rich voice interaction scene, which was recognized and trusted by Yalla.

3. The industry's leading 3A algorithm effectively eliminates all kinds of noise and ensures a clear voice environment

Voice interaction anytime, anywhere is one of the reasons why Yalla is so popular among users. However, due to the different real-time environment of users, it is inevitable to hear echoes and background sounds from the other party's device when communicating with the microphone, which interferes with the real-time interactive communication of users and greatly affects the user experience. In response to this problem, Agora has the industry-leading 3A algorithm, which intelligently adapts to various environments, realizes precise audio source separation, eliminates unnecessary far-end signals from the mixed near-end signals, and preserves the near-end vocals sent to the far-end , Fully eliminate echo and realize high-fidelity audio experience. In addition, the sound network AI noise reduction algorithm can separate human voice and environmental noise in real time, suppress common noise in the environment, and extract clear human voice from environmental noise, thereby providing a high-quality and clear voice environment.

4. Timely locate the problem, and realize the efficiency improvement from "day" to "second"

From the actual operation point of view, even scenes such as Maiyu chat will encounter a series of quality problems such as freezes, echoes, and noise. These quality issues will directly affect the user experience. In order to solve this common problem faced by many companies and developers, Agora has launched the industry's first big data analysis product "Crystal Ball" that allows companies and developers to fully understand their end-user experience. Crystal Ball can provide enterprises and developers with solutions for full-cycle call quality monitoring, retrospection and analysis, and is committed to helping enterprises and developers discover problems in a timely manner, locate the cause, and finally solve the problems to improve user experience.

Specifically, in a voice chat room with a large number of people, can all users communicate smoothly? Is the network stable during the connection process? Is the stuttering problem concentrated in a certain area or a certain type of equipment? Through the crystal ball, these problems can be turned into visual data, which can be discovered and solved in time. Last year, Crystal Ball launched version 2.0. In addition to continuing the call investigation function of 1.0, it also supports beta functions such as data insight, real-time data, and automatic diagnosis. For enterprises and developers, the use of crystal balls can not only optimize the work efficiency of customer service staff, but also effectively improve the response speed of operations staff, and help management to quickly analyze and make decisions and real-time pulse corresponding product and business strategies.

The relevant person in charge of Yalla said, "The crystal ball is of great help to our business. Combining the analysis results of the crystal ball, we can find problems in real time, diagnose the user equipment and regional network conditions in a more targeted manner, and make corresponding improvements. , Which greatly improves our work efficiency."

Wang Qi, head of Agora's social pan-entertainment product, said, "The successful listing of Yalla Group represents the success of real-time voice interaction scenarios. With the further development and popularization of 5G and smart phones in the future, I believe that real-time interaction will be applied to more , In a wider range of scenarios. As the world’s leading real-time interactive cloud service provider, Shengwang expects to bring more audio and video technology innovations in gameplay and business scenarios to the industry to better serve overseas and overseas customers."

Since its establishment, Agora has been continuously exploring and deepening the global market, serving many Chinese companies going overseas and local companies around the world. Well-known companies such as The Meet Group, the largest social networking platform for marriage and love in the United States, LisPon, the two-dimensional audio community in Japan, the North American multiplayer mobile game Bunch, and the North American multiplayer competitive game Vainglory are all customers of Agora. Acoustic network Agora has dual headquarters in Silicon Valley and Shanghai, and distributed collaborative teams in Bangalore, Tokyo, London and other overseas cities. The overseas teams can better expand overseas local customers and serve domestic customers overseas. Provide local technical and operational support. At the same time, Soundnet complies with internationally recognized information security and privacy protection standards and industry requirements, and is committed to adopting international best practices to build a privacy and security management system. At present, Shengwang has passed ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC ISO27017, ISO/IEC 27018 system certification, and obtained the SOC2 Type I service certification report issued by a third-party professional organization to prove its privacy compliance and security management ability.

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Registration for the RTE 2021 Programming Challenge is underway. Team up with friends based on Agora SDK, develop online, realize real-time interactive scenes and Soundnet SDK plug-ins, and have the opportunity to win cash prizes and entrepreneurial support and other rewards. Click here to learn more.

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