Introduction​

LINE Planet is a cloud-based communication service built on real-time voice and video (VoIP) technology that the LINE Planet team has accumulated over years of developing and operating VoIP features for LINE Messenger. Using the LINE Planet SDK and APIs—developed based on call quality and stability proven by hundreds of millions of users worldwide on LINE Messenger—you can easily integrate high-quality real-time communication features at the same level as LINE Messenger into your service.

LINE Planet is designed to abstract complex network control and media processing so that developers can focus on business logic and user experience. With demo apps, quick starts, and example code provided along with official documentation, you can quickly implement your first call and gain a clear understanding of the entire integration flow.

In this article, we explore LINE Planet's features from multiple perspectives in a fact-sheet format.

Hello, I'm Juheon Jeon, responsible for iOS/macOS and Flutter PlanetKit at LINE Planet.

LINE Planet is a real-time communications platform as a service (CPaaS) that provides the cloud platform and client SDKs needed to integrate real-time voice and video calling into services.

To use LINE Planet, each service must implement its own app server on the application layer to connect LINE Planet with the service's users and devices. This post introduces a high-level guide to implementing the app server using Firebase, with minimal code examples showing the core API design and implementation patterns.

Hello! I'm Deokbeom Jeong, the product manager of LINE Planet, a solution that makes it easy to implement audio and video calls in your service.

Product managers and other service stakeholders often describes their services as "like their own child" because of the affection they pour into them. Just as parents spare no effort to support their child's growth, service stakeholders also invest heavily in the growth of their services. They add new features, introduce attractive content, and create communities where users can meet and chat.

One of the best ways to grow a service is to make it a place like a playground or plaza where users can mingle and have fun. When user communication is active, the time users spend on the service naturally increases.

To achieve this, many services prepare various communication methods for users. They create spaces for posting, add features for commenting on others' posts, and introduce messengers for people with similar interests to chat.

However, depending on the nature of the service, this might not be enough. In this article, I'll explain why you should introduce in-app calls to your service.

Experiencing audio and video call technology requires more effort compared to other technologies. The previously released "LINE Planet quick start" (reference) was intended to help people with limited IT knowledge easily follow along and quickly make their first call. The LINE Planet demo application introduced in this article also aims to provide a quick calling experience, but it lets you implement your own code in a context that is closer to a real service implementation. In addition, it helps you accelerate development when creating real services by referring to the source code published on GitHub.

We named this demo application "LINE Planet Call", and we'll continue to update and manage it. Although it's a demo application, we don't intend to simply use it for demonstration purposes only. We'll treat it as one of user services and manage it with care. Now, let's take a look at how LINE Planet Call is structured and what it offers.

Hello, World.

For beginners in programming, the first typical example often involves displaying "Hello, World" on a monitor. This serves as an introduction to creating their first working program.

What if you want to use audio or video call features? There isn't an iconic "Hello, World" equivalent in this domain, so you are free to say whatever you wish. However, before deciding what to say, you first need to create code that makes the audio and video call features work. This is where you might encounter your first major challenge.

The audio and video call features we use daily are technically complex because they must operate in real time. As a result, more amount of complex code is required than simply displaying "Hello, World" on a monitor. Because of this, users often face difficulties when integrating audio and video call features into their services.

That's why we decided to provide a quick start to help users easily and quickly experience and understand the features of LINE Planet. We aimed to make it accessible so that even users with a low level of IT knowledge could handle the features directly during the product development process using the quick start. In this article, we will share the experiences we had during this process.

In an article "Measuring voice quality in the LINE app" on the LY Corporation Tech Blog, we outlined three key areas for quantitatively measuring the voice quality of the LINE app: acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), frequency response, and loss robustness. Because the LINE app uses the VoIP module provided by LINE Planet for its voice call function, the same measurement method can be applied to assess the voice quality of LINE Planet.

Going forward, whenever a version of LINE Planet is released with improvements that affect voice quality, we will conduct performance measurements in the aforementioned areas. This will allow us to quantitatively determine voice quality and identify areas that have improved over the previous version or need further enhancement. We will refer to the voice quality measurement results of each version as a "voice quality snapshot".

This article represents the first in a series where we will compare and analyze voice quality snapshots across different versions of LINE Planet. It mainly deals with the results of comparing and analyzing voice quality snapshots of PlanetKit 5.1 and PlanetKit 5.2.

Hello. I'm Sungchang Ha, a technical writer at the LINE Planet project. When the LINE Planet team launched the new documentation site earlier this year, we not only provided better organization and UI but also added support for Korean language. Since then, we've been working steadily to provide an upgraded user experience.

In this article, we'd like to share the improvements we've made to the LINE Planet documentation site leading up to the recent releases of PlanetKit 5.2 and WebPlanetKit 5.2. We'll focus on key aspects of the improvements: refining information architecture, improving developer experience, and optimizing search functionality.

The prolonged COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in non-face-to-face activities, such as remote working and distance learning. As people continue to adapt to the new normal, many have realized the advantages of these activities and have come to prefer them. Even as the pandemic subsides, the trend towards non-face-to-face activities has been growing steadily.

For non-face-to-face activities, it is essential to have a video conferencing system that allows participants to convey information to one another. This article explores how voice information is delivered in a video conference and explains how to deliver voice with better quality.