Agora Inc.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 21, 2026 /CNW/ -- Agora, Inc. (NASDAQ: API), a global leader in real-time engagement and conversational AI, today announced a strategic partnership with Sentino to create a new AI Agent Platform for Physical AI--designed to help AI brands and device makers build long-term, emotionally engaging AI companions.

Built using Agora's Conversational AI Engine, the platform combines real-time conversation with memory, emotion, and multimodal expression--moving AI beyond simple chat and toward daily companionship.

"The next frontier of AI isn't just about intelligence; it's about presence. By combining Sentino's expertise in emotional depth with Agora's real-time Conversational AI Engine, we are enabling developers to move beyond transactional interactions. We're building the infrastructure for AI that doesn't just answer questions, but connects with people in a meaningful, long-term way," said Tony Wang, Agora's Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer.

From Chatbots to Companions

Most AI agents are designed to respond. Few are designed to stay.

Agora and Sentino are addressing this gap by enabling AI agents to maintain presence, remember shared moments, and express emotion over time. The result is AI that users don't just try once--but return to again and again.

A Simple, Scalable Ecosystem

• Agora provides the real-time AI infrastructure and overall platform design
  
  
  
  
• Sentino AI delivers agent personas and companion features on top of Agora's conversational AI
  
  
  
  
• Customers can quickly launch AI-powered products without building core systems from scratch

This approach reduces complexity and speeds up time to market.

Four Core Features That Create Long-Term Engagement

1. Agent "OS" (Inner Thoughts): Always Present

AI agents automatically generate short, context-aware inner thoughts based on user interaction and idle time. These reflections give the agent a sense of ongoing presence--even when no conversation is happening.

Why it matters

• Agents feel alive, not silent
  
  
  
  
• Users form stronger emotional bonds and return more often

2. AI Diary: Remembering Shared Moments

AI Diary turns daily interactions into a short, persona-consistent diary entry--capturing meaningful events and emotions without any user effort.

Why it matters

• Builds a shared history between user and agent
  
  
  
  
• Encourages users to revisit past moments, increasing retention

3. Diary Illustration: Making Memories Visual

Each diary entry can include an automatically generated, crayon-style image that reflects the agent's personality and the day's story.

Why it matters

• Adds emotional depth without extra interaction
  
  
  
  
• Especially engaging for children, families, and lifestyle devices

4. Music Diary: Turning Memories into Sound

Music Diary transforms diary content into emotion-driven music that users can replay and revisit.

Why it matters

• Deepens emotional connection through sound
  
  
  
  
• Creates opportunities for premium content and subscriptions

Why Scenario-Based AI Works

Task-based AI solves problems. Scenario-based AI builds habits.

By focusing on daily experiences--memories, reflections, visuals, and music--the platform keeps AI agents emotionally relevant and continuously engaging.

Built for Real-World Use Cases

The platform supports a wide range of Physical AI applications, including:

• AI companions and lifestyle devices
  
  
  
  
• Education and language learning
  
  
  
  
• Fandom and brand avatars
  
  
  
  
• Meditation, reflection, and emotional guidance

Shared building blocks allow brands to expand their features quickly and easily.

Executive Perspective

"We are dedicated to building human-centric AI," said Chris Chen, CEO of Sentino. "By transforming static characters into living assets, we are enabling IP holders to move beyond simple interactions and build sustainable, emotional economies with their fans."

A Platform Designed to Grow Over Time

With ongoing updates and new companion scenarios, the Agora × Sentino platform is built to evolve--without disrupting existing products.

Shaping the Future of Physical AI

Together, Agora and Sentino are redefining Physical AI as AI that feels present, personal, and worth coming back to.

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 Sentino

Guided by the vision of building human-centric AI, Sentino is an innovator in Physical AI, providing global IP holders with a cost-efficient IP monetization engine to transform static characters into living assets. By integrating proprietary bionic memory systems with a vertical hardware supply chain, Sentino enables instant, human-like interaction that redefines the fan economy --converting interaction costs into compounding revenue assets and driving exponential LTV growth. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, Sentino is trusted by top-tier global properties--including the agency of a global K-Pop icon --to power the next generation of fan engagement. Contact: contact@sentino.jp

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SOURCE Agora, Inc.

-- 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.

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SOURCE Agora, Inc.