Glossary · AI & Agents
Pipecat
Overview
What Pipecat is
Pipecat is an open-source framework, written in Python, for building real-time voice and multimodal conversational AI. It was created and open-sourced by Daily, the real-time video and audio infrastructure company.
Rather than tying you to a single vendor, Pipecat provides the plumbing to connect speech recognition, language models, and speech synthesis into a working voice agent, letting you mix and match providers for each stage.
How it works
Pipecat structures an agent as a pipeline of processors—audio in, speech-to-text, a language model, text-to-speech, and audio out. It streams data through this pipeline and manages the hard real-time details: interruptions, turn-taking, and low-latency handoffs between services.
It integrates with many providers, including Deepgram for transcription, OpenAI and other LLMs for reasoning, and ElevenLabs, Cartesia, or similar engines for speech. Transport can run over WebRTC or telephony, and it pairs with infrastructure like Daily and LiveKit.
Why it matters
Building a responsive voice agent from scratch means solving streaming, barge-in, and orchestration across several APIs. Pipecat handles that scaffolding so teams can focus on conversation design and business logic instead of real-time audio infrastructure.
Being open source and vendor-neutral, it avoids lock-in and lets you swap components as models improve or pricing changes. It occupies similar territory to hosted voice-agent platforms like Vapi and Retell AI, but as a framework it offers more control at the cost of running your own stack.
Where we use it
Related Zen in Tech services
How our team puts Pipecat to work in real projects.
FAQ
Pipecat — common questions
Is Pipecat open source and free?
Yes. Pipecat is an open-source framework released under a permissive license and is free to use. You still pay the underlying providers you plug in—such as speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech services—and any hosting you run.
Who created Pipecat?
Pipecat was created and open-sourced by Daily, a company that provides real-time audio and video infrastructure. It reflects Daily's focus on low-latency, real-time media applied to conversational AI.
How is Pipecat different from Vapi or Retell AI?
Pipecat is a self-hosted, open-source framework you assemble and run yourself, giving maximum control. Vapi and Retell AI are hosted platforms that manage the infrastructure for you, trading some flexibility for faster setup and less operational overhead.
Need Pipecat done right?
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