LiveKit is a comprehensive framework for building and orchestrating real-time, multimodal AI agents that interact with users through voice, video, and text. It provides a centralized, event-driven architecture to manage the entire lifecycle of automated participants, from initialization and session state management to graceful shutdown. By utilizing a selective forwarding unit, the platform efficiently routes media streams between participants and agents, ensuring low-latency communication and secure, token-based authentication for all connections.
The platform distinguishes itself through its modular pipeline-based media processing, which chains specialized speech-to-text, language, and text-to-speech services into cohesive workflows. It includes advanced capabilities for real-time voice activity detection, enabling natural turn-taking and interruption handling, alongside remote procedure call tooling that allows agents to execute external functions or access local resources during a conversation. Developers can further extend these interactions by integrating photorealistic virtual avatars that synchronize visual expressions with the agent's audio output.
Beyond core conversational logic, the system offers extensive support for telephony integration, allowing agents to connect to public networks via SIP for inbound and outbound calling. It provides a robust suite of observability and monitoring tools to track agent performance, connection quality, and session events, ensuring reliability in production environments. The platform also includes specialized utilities for task automation, such as capturing and validating structured user data, and supports multi-step workflow orchestration to handle complex, context-aware interactions.
The project provides a command-line interface for scaffolding, deploying, and testing agent applications, with documentation available in machine-readable formats to assist in development.
