Decoding the future of Real-Time Engagement (RTE)

Today’s fast-paced business environments demand that businesses engage with customers in a way that is efficient, personalised, and cost-effective. Besides, with customers becoming more demanding, it is crucial for businesses to respond quickly, to maintain their trust and competitive advantage

This is where Real-Time Engagement (RTE) tools and platforms like Agora shine.

To discuss this and more, Agora.io in association with YourStory organised a roundtable – ‘Startup to scaleup: How Real-Time Engagement fosters a growth mentality’ – featuring Rishi Raj Singh Ahluwalia, Director of Engineering, Agora.io; Sumairah Bhat, Founders’ Office, Newton School; Akash Kasaundhan, Senior Director- Business, Teachmint Technologies; Kamalanathan Viswanathan, Head of Data, Lead School; Anuj Mishra, Co-founder, Oda Class/ Pigeon Education Technology India; Savio Sebastian, Chief Technology Officer, PakkaProfile; MG Dayanidhi, Founder and CEO, nCore Games; Satish Asapu, Architect, Director DataScience and Engineering, BetterPlace; Vinay Vijay, VP Engineering, Junglee Games; and Abhishek Goswami, Founding Member - Head Of Partnerships, FrontRow.

Rishi opened the discussion by establishing the importance of Agora as a Real-Time Engagement (RTE) platform for meaningful human connections.

Starting from Software Development Kits (SDKs) and APIs for Live interactive voice and video communication, to no-code and low-code solutions for the same, Agora ensures that a large cross-section of developers and businesses can pick and choose the option that works best for them.

“The emergence of connectivity and access to powerful and more capable devices in the last few years acted as a catalyst for RTE. Today Agora powers several of the biggest apps in India across domains - be it social, gaming, education, healthcare, enterprise collaboration, virtual events, and many more.” Rishi said.

Interestingly, he also added that the term Real-Time Engagement (RTE) was coined by Agora and now we see our competitors adopting the same terminology.

Scaling up with RTE

Next, the leaders shared some use cases of RTE engagement in their businesses. For Anuj, Real-Time Engagement means engaging students in different possible ways through chats, quizzes, tags, polls, and several other engagement features to ensure their participation throughout the session, including gamification of the entire conversation.

Interestingly Anuj felt that RTE players like Agora are essential to speed up the time-to-market instead of building this capability in-house.

Clarifying a misconception that RTE is reserved only for big players, Rishi explained that RTE is helping companies of all sizes to build very efficient, scalable, and monetizable RTE features. Be it the Agora chat model for gaming, customised App Builder (no-code) for enterprise collaboration, or interactive whiteboard, Agora has solutions working across several small, medium, and large companies.

“Companies starting their journey prefer our no code, low code solution, rather than integrating the SDK because of the speed to market. The efficiency is ensured with the global availability of Agora’s Software-Defined Real-Time Network (SD-RTN). This means that the flow and existence of traffic is via the closest node to ensure low latency and extremely high quality.” explained Rishi.

Envisioning RTE in Web3 and Metaverse

For Rishi, Metaverse is still in its infancy and the possibilities are immense.

“We are exploring various prospects with the elements of metaverse and are beginning to see an adoption of this in the creation of more engaging classroom environments, Live concerts in the metaverse, sports fan engagement in the metaverse etc. ,” he added.

Thus, from adding new integrated communication features to going all in on the metaverse, RTE will strive to replicate real-life user experiences through virtual tools and mediums.

In conclusion, the leaders were asked about the kind of support expected of their tech partner while integrating RTE into the system. Anuj said that from a growth and product development perspective, real-time engagement helps to validate or discard a certain understanding, at a faster pace, instead of building these capabilities in-house.

Sneak peek at what’s new

Apart from Live, interactive voice and video capabilities, Agora Chat enables businesses of all sizes to add customised messaging to their real-time experiences while also supporting third-party extensions like emojis, GIFs, stickers, and content moderation to enhance the experience for their users.

Real-time Speech-To-Text (STT) was yet another feature that participants got a sneak peek at. STT enables users to get fast, accurate, and affordable real-time transcription closed caption (CC) service. Several languages, including Hindi, are supported currently, with many more languages in the pipeline