pipecat-ai/pipecat

🎙️ Pipecat: Real-Time Voice & Multimodal AI Agents

Pipecat is an open-source Python framework for building real-time voice and multimodal conversational agents. Build a single voice agent or a full multi-agent system where specialists hand off, fan out in parallel, and coordinate over a shared bus, locally or distributed across processes and machines. Orchestrate audio and video, AI services, transports, and conversation pipelines effortlessly, so you can focus on what makes your agents unique.

🚀 What you can build

• Voice Assistants – natural, streaming conversations with AI
• Multi-Agent Systems – specialists that hand off, fan out in parallel, or run as sidecars over a shared bus
• AI Companions – coaches, meeting assistants, characters
• Multimodal Interfaces – voice, video, images, and more
• Interactive Storytelling – creative tools with generative media
• Business Agents – customer intake, support bots, guided flows
• Complex Dialog Systems – design logic with structured conversations

🧠 Why Pipecat?

• Voice-first: Integrates speech recognition, text-to-speech, and conversation handling
• Pluggable: Supports many AI services and tools
• Composable Pipelines: Build complex behavior from modular components
• Multi-Agent Ready: Each pipeline is an agent. Compose them with handoff, parallel fan-out, sidecar workers, or distributed deployments
• Real-Time: Ultra-low latency interaction with different transports (e.g. WebSockets or WebRTC)

🌐 Pipecat ecosystem

📱 Client SDKs

Building client applications? You can connect to Pipecat from any platform using our official SDKs:

JavaScript | React | React Native | Swift | Kotlin | C++ | ESP32

🧭 Structured conversations

Need predefined or dynamic conversation paths with state management? Pipecat Flows is built into Pipecat. Browse the examples to see it in action.

🪄 Beautiful UIs

Want to build beautiful and engaging experiences? Checkout the Voice UI Kit, a collection of components, hooks and templates for building voice AI applications quickly.

🛠️ Create and deploy projects

The Pipecat CLI ships with pipecat-ai — install it with uv tool install "pipecat-ai[cli]". Run pipecat init to start a project: it sets you up so an AI coding assistant (Claude Code, Codex) builds it for you, and can scaffold a runnable bot in under a minute. Then use the CLI to monitor and deploy your agent to production.

🔍 Debugging

Looking for help debugging your pipeline and processors? Check out Whisker, a real-time Pipecat debugger.

🖥️ Terminal

Love terminal applications? Check out Tail, a terminal dashboard for Pipecat.

🤖 Claude Code skills

Use Pipecat Skills with Claude Code to scaffold projects, deploy to Pipecat Cloud, and more. Install the marketplace with:

claude plugin marketplace add pipecat-ai/skills

and install any of the available plugins.

🧩 Community integrations

Build and share your own Pipecat service integrations! Browse existing community integrations or check out our guide to create your own.

📺️ Pipecat TV channel

Catch new features, interviews, and how-tos on our Pipecat TV channel.

🎬 See it in action

🧩 Available services

📚 View full services documentation →

⚡ Getting started

Run Pipecat on your local machine, then move your agent processes to the cloud when you're ready. Either way, you'll need uv — install it first:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Start a new project with the CLI

The quickest path: install the Pipecat CLI and scaffold a new phone or web/mobile bot interactively.

uv tool install "pipecat-ai[cli]"
pipecat init

Follow the quickstart guide to get your very first bot running, or dive a little deeper into bootstrapping a project.

Manual installation

Prefer to wire things up yourself?

1. 1Install the module # For new projects uv init my-pipecat-app cd my-pipecat-app uv add pipecat-ai # Or for existing projects uv add pipecat-ai
2. 2Set up your environment cp env.example .env
3. 3To keep things lightweight, only the core framework is included by default. If you need support for third-party AI services, you can add the necessary dependencies with: uv add "pipecat-ai[option,...]"

From here, the code examples below are the best way to learn — agents you can run, read, and adapt.

🧪 Code examples

• Focused examples — small agents that each illustrate one or two specific services or concepts
• Example apps — complete applications you can use as starting points for development

🛠️ Developing Pipecat

Prerequisites

Minimum Python Version: 3.11 Recommended Python Version: >= 3.12

Setup steps

1. 1Clone the repository and navigate to it: git clone https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat.git cd pipecat
2. 2Install development and testing dependencies: uv sync --group dev --all-extras \ --no-extra gstreamer \ --no-extra local \
3. 3Install the git pre-commit hooks: uv run pre-commit install

Claude Code skills

Install development workflow skills for contributing to Pipecat with Claude Code:

claude plugin marketplace add pipecat-ai/pipecat
claude plugin install pipecat-dev@pipecat-dev-skills

Running tests

To run all tests, from the root directory:

uv run pytest

Run a specific test suite:

uv run pytest tests/test_name.py

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions from the community! Whether you're fixing bugs, improving documentation, or adding new features, here's how you can help:

• Found a bug? Open an issue
• Have a feature idea? Start a discussion
• Want to contribute code? Check our CONTRIBUTING.md guide
• Documentation improvements? Docs PRs are always welcome

Before submitting a pull request, please check existing issues and PRs to avoid duplicates.

We aim to review all contributions promptly and provide constructive feedback to help get your changes merged.

🛟 Getting help

➡️ Join our Discord

➡️ Read the docs

➡️ Reach us on X