QTalk believes communication should be more than just text. To fulfill their goal for real-time experiences with voice apps, QTalk relies on Plivo and the Plivo Android SDK to scale quickly and deploy leading-edge features.

Despite incredible advancements in smartphone technology over the years, the act of calling hasn’t changed much. You tap out a number on a numeric keypad, you chat, and then you hang up.

Startup QTalk is transforming the calling experience by building a voice-first mobile communication platform. Its not just a calling app — it’s an app for real-time experiences.

“We believe that voice is a far more efficient way of communication than text,” says Sagar Modi, the company’s CEO and founder.

There’s a lot of value to be added to calls, whether it’s entertainment or providing games and videos inside calls. But the first step is just to get people onto a unified calling platform, and that’s what we’re doing now.

Modularity and flexibility

QTalk started by building a rock-solid dialer for Android, including call recording. Then the team began working to fulfill another goal: providing data calling that would help them achieve their long-term vision for voice apps.

“As soon as we decided to add data calling, we knew the architecture would need to be modular and flexible because of all the real-time experiences we are planning,” Modi says. “We researched the products in the market and even tried out a few. But once we started working with Plivo we realized it had all the modularity and many features we needed.

QTalk brings many options for callers. The app can decide whether to connect the call through VoIP or through the cellular network depending on the caller and network availability. It offers terms of services that are either not available or expensive on a traditional cellular network, including recording and voice mail. Users are also notified of call disconnection causes, which provides more visibility than regular dialers, where you’re left guessing why the call was disconnected.

To spur further growth and awareness of QTalk, the developers added a call whisper with the message “Call from QTalk” to each recipient of a call. This small audio clip has had immense benefits, as nonusers of the app become aware and search for it, driving more downloads. The company is planning to add “voice emojis” with short audio clips that people can play in calls.

Scaling beyond launch

Within two weeks of the launch of QTalk, the app had more than 10,000 installs. Since then QTalk is seeing 10-15% growth in active users and number of calls handled each day. With Plivo, they can easily scale to meet the demands of higher call volumes.

“We’re building an app for literally a billion people in India, and that’s a goal not chased very often,” Modi says.

For Modi, it’s not only the reliability of Plivo and the Android SDK, but also the freedom it provides.

“Using Plivo gives us the bandwidth to focus on our consumer value proposition, and that has been a highlight for us,” he says. “We can focus on what the app looks like, what features we need to add, and what games we need to build. Plivo takes the load away, allowing us to scale very quickly.”