🎙️ 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:

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? Check out Pipecat UI, a shadcn registry of components for building voice AI applications. Browse the documentation for component previews and installation guides.

🛠️ 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.

Add to an existing project

uv add pipecat-ai

To keep things lightweight, only the core framework is included by default. Add extras for the third-party AI services you use:

uv add "pipecat-ai[option,...]"

Using pip? pip install pipecat-ai and pip install "pipecat-ai[option,...]" work too.

Pipecat runs on Python 3.11 through 3.14. Python 3.15 is not supported yet, because onnxruntime publishes no wheels for it. Pin your project to a supported version, for example with uv python pin 3.14.

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. Clone the repository and navigate to it:

   git clone https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat.git
   cd pipecat
   

2. Install development and testing dependencies:

   uv sync --group dev --all-extras \
     --no-extra gstreamer \
     --no-extra local
   

3. Install the git pre-commit hooks:

   uv run pre-commit install
   

Note: Some extras (local, gstreamer) require system dependencies. See documentation if you encounter build errors.

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

Tests run in parallel, one worker per CPU core. Pass -n 0 to run them in a single process.

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

➡️ Enterprise support for consulting and support agreements