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Accounts you’ll need

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 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 need to set up Daily and Cartesia accounts.

Learn about other supported services you can use with Pipecat.

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Prerequisites

Pipecat requires Python 3.10 or higher. To check your Python version:

python --version

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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

Activate the virtual environment based on your operating system:

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,openai]"

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

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Service Configuration

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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:

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Cartesia Text-to-Speech Setup

From Cartesia’s Voice library, find a voice that you like. Then click the three dots at the end of the row and select Copy ID.

Then, head over to Cartesia API keys and create your API key.

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Environment Setup

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

DAILY_SAMPLE_ROOM_URL=https://YOURDOMAIN.daily.co/YOURROOM
DAILY_API_KEY=your_daily_api_key
CARTESIA_API_KEY=your_cartesia_api_key
CARTESIA_VOICE_ID=your_voice_id

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Next Steps

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

OverviewQuickstart