LiveKit Agents Starter - Python

A complete starter project for building voice AI apps with LiveKit Agents for Python.

The starter project includes:

• A simple voice AI assistant based on the Voice AI quickstart
• Voice AI pipeline based on OpenAI, Cartesia, and Deepgram
  • Easily integrate your preferred LLM, STT, and TTS instead, or swap to a realtime model like the OpenAI Realtime API
• Eval suite based on the LiveKit Agents testing & evaluation framework
• LiveKit Turn Detector for contextually-aware speaker detection, with multilingual support
• LiveKit Cloud enhanced noise cancellation
• Integrated metrics and logging

This starter app is compatible with any custom web/mobile frontend or SIP-based telephony.

Dev Setup

Clone the repository and install dependencies to a virtual environment:

cd agent-starter-python
uv sync

Set up the environment by copying .env.example to .env and filling in the required values:

• LIVEKIT_URL: Use LiveKit Cloud or run your own
• LIVEKIT_API_KEY
• LIVEKIT_API_SECRET
• OPENAI_API_KEY: Get a key or use your preferred LLM provider
• DEEPGRAM_API_KEY: Get a key or use your preferred STT provider
• CARTESIA_API_KEY: Get a key or use your preferred TTS provider

You can load the LiveKit environment automatically using the LiveKit CLI:

lk app env -w .env

Run the agent

Before your first run, you must download certain models such as Silero VAD and the LiveKit turn detector:

uv run python src/agent.py download-files

Next, run this command to speak to your agent directly in your terminal:

uv run python src/agent.py console

To run the agent for use with a frontend or telephony, use the dev command:

uv run python src/agent.py dev

In production, use the start command:

uv run python src/agent.py start

Web and mobile frontends

To use a prebuilt frontend or build your own, see the agents frontend guide.

Telephony

To add a phone number, see the agents telephony guide.

Tests and evals

This project includes a complete suite of evals, based on the LiveKit Agents testing & evaluation framework. To run them, use pytest.

uv run pytest evals

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.