LiveKit Agents

LiveKit Agents is an open-source framework for building real-time, multimodal AI agents that can see, hear, and speak. Built on top of LiveKit's WebRTC infrastructure, it provides the transport layer and developer framework needed to create voice agents, video AI assistants, and other real-time AI applications that interact with users through audio and video streams rather than just text.

The framework's architecture centers on a worker process model where agent code runs as "workers" that connect to LiveKit rooms. When a user joins a room, the agent worker is dispatched to participate alongside them, receiving audio/video tracks and sending responses back in real-time. This design handles the complex WebRTC plumbing — media encoding/decoding, network adaptation, echo cancellation — so developers can focus on the AI logic.

LiveKit Agents provides a plugin system for integrating with AI services at each stage of the voice pipeline: Speech-to-Text (Deepgram, Google, AssemblyAI, Azure), LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, local models), and Text-to-Speech (ElevenLabs, Cartesia, PlayHT, Azure). The framework handles the orchestration between these components, including critical details like Voice Activity Detection (VAD), interruption handling, and turn-taking that make voice conversations feel natural rather than robotic.

A key technical differentiator is LiveKit's approach to latency. The framework supports "speech-to-speech" pipelines where audio goes directly to multimodal models (like GPT-4o Realtime) without intermediate transcription, achieving sub-second response times. For traditional STT→LLM→TTS pipelines, it implements streaming at every stage — the LLM starts generating while transcription finishes, and TTS starts speaking while the LLM is still generating — minimizing perceived latency.

The platform is fully open-source (Apache 2.0) with the agent framework, server, and client SDKs all available on GitHub. LiveKit Cloud provides managed infrastructure for teams that don't want to operate their own WebRTC servers, with a free tier for development. Self-hosting is straightforward with Docker or Kubernetes, giving teams full control over their data and infrastructure.

For production deployments, LiveKit Agents supports horizontal scaling across multiple worker processes, health monitoring, graceful shutdown, and automatic reconnection. The framework includes built-in support for function calling, allowing voice agents to execute tools and access external systems during conversations. This makes it suitable for building production voice AI applications like customer service agents, AI tutors, telehealth assistants, and meeting copilots.