app · Daily.co (open source community project)
Pipecat
Pipecat is an MIT-licensed open-source framework for building the same kind of cascaded voice pipeline ElevenLabs or Retell offer commercially — voice activity detection, speech-to-text, an LLM, and text-to-speech — except you own every piece and pay nothing beyond the component costs (or $0 if you run local models). It reached v1.0 in April 2026 and ships with 60+ integrations, so you can plug in whichever STT, LLM, and TTS you already trust, including fully local ones. It's transport-agnostic, meaning it can carry audio over WebRTC via Daily or LiveKit, or other transports, so it isn't tied to one hosting vendor. LiveKit Agents (Apache-2.0) is the closest sibling project — also open source, also WebRTC-based, worth comparing if you're choosing a foundation. Pipecat is the pick when you want maximum control, zero vendor lock-in, and are comfortable doing the integration work yourself.
What it can help with
- voice activity detection
- speech to text
- text to speech
- local models
- webrtc transport
- open source pipeline
- component integration