Glossary · AI & Agents
LiveKit
Overview
What LiveKit is
LiveKit is an open-source infrastructure platform for building real-time voice, video, and AI applications on top of WebRTC. It provides the media servers, SDKs, and cloud services that move audio and video between users, devices, and AI agents with low latency.
The LiveKit Agents framework is the layer most relevant to conversational AI. It lets developers run a Python or Node.js program inside a LiveKit room as a full real-time participant, feeding live media through an AI pipeline and publishing responses back to the caller.
How it works
A voice agent built on LiveKit typically follows a streaming pipeline: speech-to-text transcribes the caller, a large language model generates a reply, and text-to-speech voices it. The framework handles the hard real-time problems around this loop, including turn detection, interruption handling, and orchestration.
LiveKit is provider-neutral, with plugins for major STT, LLM, and TTS vendors, plus support for the Model Context Protocol so agents can call external tools. You can self-host the open-source stack or run it on LiveKit Cloud.
When to use it
Reach for LiveKit when you need full control over a real-time voice or video agent and are comfortable writing code, rather than assembling a flow in a no-code builder. It suits custom telephony, in-app voice, and multimodal experiences where latency and flexibility matter.
Teams that prefer a managed, faster-to-launch path often choose hosted platforms like Vapi or Retell AI, which use similar pipelines under the hood. LiveKit trades some of that convenience for openness and deeper customization.
Where we use it
Related Zen in Tech services
How our team puts LiveKit to work in real projects.
FAQ
LiveKit — common questions
Is LiveKit free?
The core LiveKit stack, including the Agents framework, is open source and free to self-host. LiveKit Cloud is a managed, usage-based service with its own pricing for teams that prefer not to run their own infrastructure.
What languages does LiveKit Agents support?
The Agents framework offers official SDKs for Python and Node.js. Client SDKs for connecting apps and devices cover web, iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, and more.
How is LiveKit different from Vapi or Retell AI?
LiveKit is open-source infrastructure you build on directly, while Vapi and Retell AI are managed platforms with more turnkey tooling. LiveKit gives more control and portability; the hosted platforms trade some flexibility for speed of deployment.
Need LiveKit done right?
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Knowledge hub
From our knowledge hub
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