Overview

Assembles the whole speech-to-speech loop — transcription, model, synthesis, interruption handling — as a pipeline of swappable services, which is the tedious part to get right. Latency is the entire game in voice, and turn-taking and barge-in are first-class here rather than bolted on. Running it well means caring about transport and network topology, not only which model you picked.

What can you do with Pipecat?

Scaffold and deploy from the CLI — The CLI ships with the package via uv tool install "pipecat-ai[cli]"; pipecat init quickstart scaffolds a bot that runs, and the same CLI monitors and deploys it to production.
Compose a multi-agent system — Each pipeline counts as one agent, and pipelines hand off to each other, fan out in parallel, or run as sidecar workers over a shared bus, in one process or spread across machines.
Script conversation paths with Flows — Pipecat Flows is built into the framework for predefined or dynamic conversation paths with state management, with working versions under examples/flows.
Connect clients on any platform — Official client SDKs cover JavaScript, React, React Native, Swift, Kotlin and C++, plus an ESP32 build for hardware, connecting over WebSocket or WebRTC transports.
Debug a live pipeline — Whisker attaches to a running pipeline as a real-time debugger for its processors, and Tail presents the same activity as a terminal dashboard.

Documentation

Reproduced from the pipecat-ai/pipecat README, published under BSD-2-Clause. Read the original ↗

🎙️ 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.

Want to dive right in? Run pipecat init quickstart or follow the quickstart guide.

🚀 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:

🧭 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

This README has been shortened. The full version is on GitHub. Read the original ↗