pipecat-guardrails

Output guardrails for Pipecat voice agents. It checks what your bot is about to say, and stops it before it is spoken.

Status: early development. Version 0.0.1 contains the package structure only, with no guardrails yet. Follow the repo for the first usable release (0.1.0).

The problem

Pipecat has no built-in output guardrail, so every team writes its own processor between the LLM and the TTS. These homemade processors tend to break on user interruptions, keep speaking after a violation, let blocked text into the LLM history, and miss paraphrases and Hindi/Hinglish text.

This package will provide one processor you add to your pipeline:

pipeline = Pipeline([
    transport.input(), stt, context_aggregator.user(), llm,
    OutputGuardProcessor(guard),   # checks each sentence before it is spoken
    tts, transport.output(), context_aggregator.assistant(),
])

There will also be a plain await guard.check(text) for apps that run their own LLM loop.

See BEFORE_AFTER.md for a side-by-side comparison and PLAN.md for the design and roadmap.

Install

pip install pipecat-guardrails          # includes Pipecat
pip install "pipecat-guardrails[jev]"   # also installs the TypeSafe Jev classifier client

Requires Python 3.11+ and Pipecat 1.12 or later (installed automatically).

How checking works

Each sentence goes through up to three layers, and stops at the first one that is sure:

1. Banned words, PII, regex: local and instant.
2. Classifier model (optional), such as TypeSafe Jev: a fast yes/no model with an API key. A confident answer decides; an unsure one moves to layer 3.
3. LLM judge (optional): any OpenAI-compatible LLM gives the final answer.

Layers 2 and 3 use Pipecat's own classifiers (pipecat.classifiers), so any classifier Pipecat supports works here.

Development

uv sync                      # create .venv with dev tools
uv run pytest                # tests
uv run ruff check .          # lint
uv run ruff format .         # format
uv run pyright               # type check
uv run pre-commit install    # run the checks on every commit

License

BSD-2-Clause, the same as Pipecat.