​
Accounts you’ll need (or want)

While you can use Pipecat without them, there are a few third-party services you’ll probably want to use with Pipecat. We recommend these to start, since they’re easy to sign up and get started for free or low cost:

  • Daily for your transport layer—handling real-time audio, video, and data exchange between the bot and user through WebRTC.
  • Cartesia, ElevenLabs, or Deepgram for text-to-speech.
  • OpenAI gets you ChatGPT for an LLM, and DALL-E for image generation.

If you’re going to run the quickstart, you’ll want to get started with Cartesia.

Learn about other supported services you can use with Pipecat.

​
Installing Pipecat

To start, we recommend using a virtual environment, or venv, inside a new directory:

mkdir pipecat-test
cd pipecat-test
python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

The pipecat-ai Python module has a lot of optional dependencies, including some pretty big AI libraries. This allows you to only install what you need. For example, to install pipecat-ai along with support for the services above, run this command (or add it to your requirements.txt):

pip install "pipecat-ai[daily,cartesia]"

Some services, like Cartesia, ElevenLabs and Deepgram, just use built-in Python functionality for REST requests, so they don’t have anything extra to install.

You can always install other dependencies later. For the full list, look for the [project.optional-dependencies] section in pyproject.toml.

​
Service Configuration

​
Daily Setup

Head over to dashboard.daily.co/rooms and create a new room. You can leave everything as-is in the room creation screen, or change anything you want. (Emoji reactions and advanced chat are fun.) Make note of:

​
Text-to-Speech Setup

​
Environment Setup

Create a .env file in your project directory with your service credentials:

​
Next Steps

Now that you’ve got everything set up, head to the Quickstart to build your first Pipecat application.

Core ConceptsQuickstart