Agora and MiniMax Deepen Global Collaboration Following MiniMax IPO to Power Real-Time Conversational AI at Scale
-- Integrating MiniMax TTS into Agora's Conversational AI Engine to deliver production-ready, human-like interaction for Call Centers, AGI, and Robotics --
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 20, 2026 /CNW/ -- Agora (NASDAQ: API), a global leader in real-time engagement infrastructure and conversational AI, today announced the deepening of its strategic collaboration with MiniMax following MiniMax's recent IPO. The partnership brings together MiniMax's cutting-edge text-to-speech (TTS) and multimodal foundation models with Agora's Conversational AI Engine and global, ultra-low-latency real-time delivery network--enabling developers and enterprises worldwide to deploy conversational AI that feels truly alive, responsive, and human.
From Model Capability to Real-World Interaction
As generative AI rapidly evolves, the industry is facing a new inflection point: model intelligence alone is no longer enough. The true challenge lies in transforming high-quality AI outputs into natural, real-time interactions across diverse devices and unpredictable networks.
MiniMax's TTS models are designed for expressive, controllable, and emotionally rich voice generation--capable of supporting diverse languages, tones, and speaking styles. Agora complements this with a fundamentally different strength: turning AI output into real-time experience.
By integrating MiniMax TTS models with Agora's Conversational AI Engine and real-time audio pipeline, AI voices can be streamed, interrupted, resumed, and adapted dynamically--matching human conversation patterns rather than static playback.
A Unique Global Angle: "Born Global" AI Meets "Delivered Global" Infrastructure
What distinguishes this collaboration is not just technical integration, but global readiness by design:
- MiniMax brings frontier AI models with global ambition--trained and optimized to serve multilingual, multicultural, and content-rich scenarios from day one.
- Agora provides a battle-tested, global, real-time network spanning 200+ countries and regions, engineered to deliver sub-second latency, jitter control, and carrier-grade reliability at massive scale.
Together, the two companies address a critical gap in the AI ecosystem:
How to deliver expressive AI voices consistently and naturally, regardless of where users are or what device they use.
Enabling the Next Generation of Voice-First Products
The joint solution is already enabling production use cases across:
- AI companions and smart devices requiring instant voice feedback
- Real-time conversational agents for customer service and enterprise workflows
- Interactive education and content platforms demanding natural speech and global reach
- Multimodal AI applications where voice must synchronize with vision, emotion, and action
Rather than forcing developers to stitch together models, playback engines, and networking layers, Agora and MiniMax offer a cohesive, end-to-end conversational AI foundation--from text generation to real-time speech delivery.
Executive Perspectives
"Conversational AI becomes truly powerful only when intelligence meets immediacy," said Tony Wang, CRO & Co-founder of Agora. "MiniMax brings world-class voice generation. Agora ensures that voice arrives instantly, naturally, and reliably--anywhere in the world. Together, we're helping developers move from demos to real, scalable products."
"MiniMax has always focused on building AI that people want to interact with," said Linda Sheng, Global Business VP at MiniMax."Partnering with Agora allows our models to perform at their best in real-time environments, unlocking global use cases that demand both expressive AI and uncompromising delivery."
Looking Ahead
Following MiniMax's IPO, the two companies plan to further expand their collaboration across real-time voice agents, AI-native devices, and multimodal conversational experiences, supporting developers and enterprises as AI moves from the cloud into everyday, interactive moments.
About Agora
Agora is the global leader in real-time engagement, providing developers with simple, flexible, and powerful APIs to embed real-time conversational AI, voice, video, interactive live streaming, and chat into their applications and IoT devices. Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, Agora is trusted by over 1,800 leading organizations across the globe to power best-in-class real-time experiences from social media and live shopping to education and telehealth. Learn more: https://agora.io/
About MiniMax
MiniMax (00100.HK) is a global AI foundation model company. Founded in early 2022, we are committed to advancing the frontiers of AI towards AGI via our mission Intelligence with Everyone.
Our proprietary multimodal models, led by MiniMax M2, Hailuo 2.3, Speech 2.6 and Music 2.0, have advanced coding capability and high agentic performance, as well as ultra-long context processing capability, and can understand, generate, and integrate a wide range of modalities, including text, audio, images, video, and music. These models power our major AI-native products -- including MiniMax Agent, Hailuo AI, MiniMax Audio, Talkie, and our enterprise and developer-facing Open API Platform, which collectively deliver intelligent, dynamic experiences to enhance productivity and quality of life for users worldwide.
To date, our proprietary models and AI-native products have cumulatively served over 212 million individual users across over 200 countries and regions, and more than 100,000 enterprises and developers across over 100 countries and regions.
SOURCE Agora, Inc.
Media contact: Claudia Oliva, [email protected]
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