Cloud communications provider Twilio Inc. today announced the launch of Twilio Live, a new cloud-based platform that allows businesses to embed live, interactive audio and video streaming solutions within applications.

“The rise of virtual experiences and the popularity of platforms like Clubhouse and TikTok have signaled that the next big channel for customer engagement is live audio and video streaming,” said Hakim Mehmood, general manager of voice and video at Twilio.

Most often, educating and engaging customers through video at large scale is a one-way endeavor that involves a team producing content in long or short clips for mass consumption. This is entirely noninteractive and doesn’t take into account the personal experience of individuals.

With Twilio Live, businesses can create live conferences within their apps that could do more than just present educational videos but also set up question-and-answer sessions for employees and users where interaction with customers could be used to open communication.

“Twilio Live gives businesses the building blocks they need to create personalized experiences for their communities and interact with millions of customers in a fresh and exciting way,” said Mehmood.

The platform provides Twilio’s infrastructure for low-latency video and audio streaming at large scale that can be custom fit for specific brands and businesses. That’s because it can be embedded, skinned and adapted to whatever app that it’s placed into.

For example, Reddit worked with Twilio Live’s team to build Reddit Talk, an audio-meeting feature that the social news aggregation website plans to fully launch later this year.

“We are continuously exploring ways to enhance communities and discussions on Reddit,” said Anand Paka, senior director of Product at Reddit. “Twilio Live has helped our team bring voice to community conversation through our key upcoming live audio feature, Reddit Talk.”

The new feature is available to a select few moderators to activate. Once a chat is live, anyone can join, but they can only listen in and react with emojis.

Listeners can raise their hands and the host can allow them to speak, mute them or remove them. That allows the host and moderators to control the discussion. The objective of the platform is to become part of whatever Reddit communities need: lectures, question-and-answer sessions, sports radio talks or hangouts.

It’s one example of how a business could make use of Twilio Live in an application to interact with employees or customers. There’s a vast opportunity for industries to take advantage of this sort of technology from education to entertainment, and more, in order to build interactive experiences.

“The virtual event has evolved from an ad-hoc experience to a permanent element of nearly every company’s internal and external engagement strategy,” said Tiger Shen, chief technology officer at virtual event platform Welcome Inc. “Building on top of Twilio’s live-streaming infrastructure allows our team to spend time on the bespoke pieces of creating a jaw-dropping product.”

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