Customer Introduction
Since its founding in Shenzhen in 2015, Insta360 has grown into a premier global smart imaging brand, holding a significant market share globally in the panoramic camera sector. The company focuses on breaking down the barriers of traditional photography by offering smart devices that make recording and sharing everyday life seamless. With offices in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong SAR, Insta360 services customers across more than 200 countries and regions.
Insta360 has built a comprehensive ecosystem of consumer and professional imaging hardware, featuring its flagship panoramic camera X6, the Flow smartphone gimbal, and its advanced action cameras. Driven by spatial intelligence, these products utilize advanced features like the "Space-Time Cabin" powered by 3D Gaussian Splatting, enabling users to reconstruct physical spaces with a single click. By combining robust hardware with an AI-driven mobile app, Insta360 has significantly transformed content creation from "how to shoot" to "how to automatically edit and share."
Challenges & Goals
Transitioning to an AI-Driven "Cameraman" Vision:
In 2015, Insta360 expanded from hardware into an automated "AI Cameraman" ecosystem covering shooting, editing, and sharing. Embedding computational photography, spatial intelligence, and AI tracking into consumer devices required massive software R&D investments, heavily straining product development cycles.
Acoustic Adaptation in Unpredictable Environments:
Standard 3A audio algorithms (AEC, AGC, ANS) designed for quiet conference rooms failed in complex real-world settings. Wind interference, reverberation, and ambient noise degraded audio quality and broke speech-to-text recognition, directly compromising user experience.
Global Scalability and Compliance:
Operating across hundreds of countries demanded a robust global network to ensure low-latency content transmission and local regulatory compliance. Scaling the business globally requires unified international nodes, low latency and consistent cloud processing speed.
Why Tencent Cloud
Industry-Leading Audio Algorithm Stability and Performance:
Insta360 selected Tencent Ethereal Audio Lab after its 3A algorithms outperformed over a dozen evaluated vendors. Leveraging Tencent Cloud's mature acoustic algorithms allowed Insta360 to stand on the shoulders of giants and significantly accelerate its product development.
"We tested over a dozen algorithm providers. Based on our comprehensive evaluation, Tencent Ethereal Audio Lab's audio processing algorithms were the most stable and delivered the strongest overall performance." — Qi Lu, Head of Insta360 Research Institute & Board Member
A Collaborative "Co-Creation" Partnership Model:
Insta360 and Tencent Cloud established a strategic co-creation partnership, dedicating shared engineering resources to align hardware and software. During the development of the Wave Professional AI Speakerphone, a three-month weekly feedback loop yielded dozens of algorithm updates. Through joint data collection, cleaning, and model optimization for extreme outdoor scenarios, the teams successfully transformed raw code into an elite, consumer-ready solution.
Highlighted Benefits
1. Successful Delivery of Superior Audio Clarity in Extreme Environments
Through the integration of Tencent Cloud's 3A algorithms, Insta360 launched the Wave Professional AI Speakerphone, achieving pristine vocal clarity even under harsh conditions like lawnmower noise. The partnership resulted in stable, reliable audio performance across diverse home and outdoor scenes, eliminating acoustic overlap and elevating speech recognition accuracy.
2. Accelerated Time-to-Market and Co-Innovation Milestones
The collaborative model enabled Insta360 to complete dozens of algorithm iterations within just three months, significantly cutting down R&D cycles and accelerating product launch timelines. This co-creation framework not only solved the immediate acoustic challenges of the Wave AI project but also paved the way for future products.
Moving forward, the partnership is set to expand in the Chinese mainland with the upcoming launch of the Mic Pro, joined forces with Tencent Meeting (VooV Meeting) for an AI Note Taker product.