Pipecat

AI

voice assistant framework

SHOW HN2024

346points
39comments
#156of 3,515 in 2024
Top 5%of 2024 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

3 positive, 6 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 1 critical, out of 10 comments about the project. Thread score +0.17.

Idea: 1 for, 1 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Open source implementation of a needed voice AI layer

    From 2 comments
    • Nice to see an open source implementation, i have been seeing many startups get into this space like https://www.retellai.com/, https://fixie.ai/ etc. They always end up needing…
      awenix on HN
    • The whole VAD thing is very interesting, keen to learn more about how it works and especially with multiple speakers!
      orliesaurus on HN
  • Examples like speech-to-speech and translation demos look impressive

    From 2 comments
    • That's absolutely amazing, both visually and technically! Do you share any insights of the development process, perhaps some code?
      TomTom101101 on HN
    • Here's a translation demo in Pipecat using the now ancient and arthritic GPT-4 Turbo model. :-) https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat/tree/main/examples/translation-chatbot As…
      kwindla on HN

Objections

  • Pipelines of STT, LLM and TTS seem inferior to native speech-to-speech models like GPT-4o

    From 2 comments
    • Yeah, same question here. Building pipelines for bridging LLMs and TTS and STT models with lower latency is fine and all, but when you compare to a natively multimodal model like…
      avarun on HN
    • I wonder how the just announced "GPT-4o" with real-time voice impacts projects like this? The demo on real-time multi language translation conversation blew me away!
      bamazizi on HN
  • Speech-to-speech support is not visible in the code

    From 1 comment
    • Your project is amazing and I'm not trying to take away from what you have accomplished. But..I looked at the code but didn't see any audio-to-audio service or model. Can you…
      ilaksh on HN

Requests

  • Add speech-to-speech or audio-to-audio model support

    From 2 comments
    • This is great but we really need an audio-to-audio model like they demoed in the open source world. Does anyone know of anything like that? Edit: someone found one:…
      ilaksh on HN
    • Your project is amazing and I'm not trying to take away from what you have accomplished. But..I looked at the code but didn't see any audio-to-audio service or model. Can you…
      ilaksh on HN
  • Live translation of phone calls

    From 2 comments
    • How would I go about using this to live translate phone calls?
      35mm on HN
    • To talk to people in languages I am not fluent in. Whisper is too slow and doesn’t allow interruption.
      35mm on HN

Questions

  • How speech-to-speech models work and how they differ from pipelines

    From 1 comment
    • How do speech to speech models work? Do they just that many more tokens to capture nuances of spoken language?
      j-bos on HN
  • How the VAD works with multiple speakers

    From 1 comment
    • The whole VAD thing is very interesting, keen to learn more about how it works and especially with multiple speakers!
      orliesaurus on HN
  • Impact of GPT-4o on projects like this

    From 1 comment
    • I wonder how the just announced "GPT-4o" with real-time voice impacts projects like this? The demo on real-time multi language translation conversation blew me away!
      bamazizi on HN

Alternatives named

  • LiveKit Agents

    From 1 comment
    • LiveKit Agents, which OpenAI uses in voice mode is also open source: https://github.com/livekit/agents
      russ on HN
  • Vapi

    From 1 comment
    • Adding to your list: https://vapi.ai -- really nice tools. (I try to keep up with all the different layers/players in this space.)
      kwindla on HN
  • Retell AI

    From 1 comment
    • Nice to see an open source implementation, i have been seeing many startups get into this space like https://www.retellai.com/, https://fixie.ai/ etc. They always end up needing…
      awenix on HN
  • Fixie.ai

    From 2 comments
    • Nice to see an open source implementation, i have been seeing many startups get into this space like https://www.retellai.com/, https://fixie.ai/ etc. They always end up needing…
      awenix on HN
    • We're (fixie.ai) working on on our SLM (speech language model). We'll release something soon to play with :)
      zkoch on HN
  • Bolna

    From 1 comment
    • We're also building bolna an open source voice orchestration: https://github.com/bolna-ai/bolna
      xan_ps007 on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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