v1.6.0

Added

• Added MOQTransport, a Media over QUIC (MoQ) transport that gives bots a bidirectional, low-latency audio + RTVI channel over QUIC instead of WebRTC or WebSockets. Install with pip install pipecat-ai[moq] and see examples/transports/transports-moq.py.

  • The bot runs as its own MoQ server (serve=True) and accepts the browser's direct connection, removing the need for a separate moq-relay process in local dev; client mode (dialingan external relay) is wired up but not yet enabled.
  • Audio rides a single Opus track; RTVI messages (including the transcript) ride a compressed, ordered JSON stream track, so MoQ is on par with the Daily and WebSocket transports for RTVI support.
  • The development runner (pipecat.runner.run) gained --moq-serve, --moq-bind, --moq-tls-generate/--moq-tls-cert/--moq-tls-key and related flags to configure the MoQ server and TLS for local dev.
    (PR #4629)

• Added reasoning support to OpenAIResponsesLLMService and OpenAIResponsesHttpLLMService. Set settings.reasoning to an OpenAIResponsesLLMService.ReasoningConfig(effort=..., summary=...) to control reasoning depth and, optionally, request a summary of the model's thinking. Summaries are surfaced the same way as Anthropic/Gemini thinking — as thought frames and the on_assistant_thought event. Reasoning is only supported by reasoning-capable models (the gpt-5.x series and the o-series); the default model, gpt-4.1, does not reason — see OpenAI's reasoning guide to pick a model.

  The model's encrypted reasoning is captured and sent back on subsequent
  turns automatically, preserving reasoning context across the conversation
  (and, with function calling, across tool-call turns). See
  examples/thinking/thinking-openai-responses.py (plus the -http and
  -functions- variants).

  When reasoning is not configured, the mainline gpt series from gpt-5
  onward defaults to effort="none" (reasoning disabled) to keep latency low
  for real-time voice — mirroring how the Gemini service disables thinking by
  default — while every other model is left at its provider default.
  Conversely, if you configure reasoning on a model known not to support it
  (e.g. gpt-4.1), the service logs a clear error up front instead of leaving
  you to decipher the raw API failure.
  (PR #4933)

• Added NO_RESPONSE to Pipecat Flows: a consolidated function can return (result, NO_RESPONSE) to finish the function call without transitioning to a new node or running the LLM. The next response can then be triggered by the next user utterance, or programmatically another way.
  (PR #4995)

• Added absent: true to eval scenario expectations: the expectation passes only when no event of the given type arrives within the within_ms budget, and fails as soon as one does. Useful for duplicate-output regressions, e.g. asserting a bot responds exactly once after a multi-worker handoff.
  (PR #4995)

• Added CrusoeLLMService, an OpenAI-compatible LLM service for Crusoe Cloud's Managed Inference API.
  (PR #5024)

• Added audio token usage to LLMTokenUsage for cost attribution with realtime models: optional input_audio_tokens, output_audio_tokens, and cache_read_input_audio_tokens fields. OpenAIRealtimeLLMService (and Azure realtime) now populates them from the Realtime API's response.done usage details, and they flow through the usage debug logs, RTVI client metrics (onlypresent when populated), and OTel span attributes (gen_ai.usage.audio.input_tokens, gen_ai.usage.audio.output_tokens, gen_ai.usage.audio.cache_read.input_tokens).
  (PR #5050)

• Added audio token usage capture to GeminiLiveLLMService: the AUDIO entries from usage_metadata's per-modality breakdowns now populate LLMTokenUsage's input_audio_tokens, output_audio_tokens, and cache_read_input_audio_tokens, flowing through usage logs, RTVI client metrics, and the gen_ai.usage.audio.* span attributes. Absent modalities are reported as unset rather than zero, and text tokens are never derived from totals (Gemini's modality details don't always sum to prompt_token_count). Gemini Live spans also now include cached and reasoningtoken counts, which the metrics path reported but spans were missing.
  (PR #5052)

• The development runner now prints a bordered startup banner flagging it as development-only, with a link to the deployment docs for running bots locally and in production.
  (PR #5060)

• Added DeepgramFluxTTSService, a websocket TTS service for Deepgram's Flux TTS (early access) at wss://api.deepgram.com/v2/speak. LLM tokens are streamed straight to the server as they arrive (TextAggregationMode.TOKEN, the default for this service; pass text_aggregation_mode=TextAggregationMode.SENTENCE to aggregate sentences instead) and each bot response is synthesized as a discrete turn, with prosody carried across turns on a single connection. Flux does not yet provide a way to cancel the active turn, so interruptions reconnect the websocket; examples/voice/voice-deepgram-flux.py is now an all-Flux bot (Flux STT + Flux TTS).
  (PR #5067)

• Added BasetenLLMService, an OpenAI-compatible LLM service for Baseten's Model APIs and dedicated deployments.

  Defaults to Baseten's serverless Model APIs endpoint, which serves
  

  open-weights models including GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek, Nemotron, and gpt-oss. To
  use a model running on your own dedicated GPUs, pass that deployment's
  /sync/v1 URL as base_url and set model to its served model name:

  ```python
  llm = BasetenLLMService(
      api_key=os.getenv("BASETEN_API_KEY"),
      base_url=deployment_url,
      settings=BasetenLLMService.Settings(
          model="Qwen/Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct",
      ),
  )
  ```
  

  (PR #5077)

• DailyTransport now broadcasts an STTMetadataFrame with Deepgram's TTFS P99 latency when transcription_enabled=True and transcription starts successfully, matching standalone STT services. Downstream consumers like LLMUserAggregator and the user-turn-stop strategies now use the correct STT latency instead of falling back to defaults.
  (PR #5088)

Changed

• Changed the default ElevenLabs TTS model from eleven_turbo_v2_5 to eleven_flash_v2_5 in ElevenLabsTTSService and ElevenLabsHttpTTSService, since eleven_turbo_v2_5 is now deprecated by ElevenLabs. This only affects users who don't explicitly set a model.
  (PR #4999)

• Bumped the minimum nltk version to 3.10.0.
  (PR #5019)

• ⚠️ The RTVI dtmf client message now carries buttons — a list of keypad entries, e.g. {"type": "dtmf", "data": {"buttons": ["1", "2", "#"]}} — so a single message can press a whole key sequence. The previous single-key button field is no longer accepted, and RTVI.PROTOCOL_VERSION is now 2.1.0. The RTVIProcessor pushes one InputDTMFFrame per key, in order, so downstream DTMF handling (e.g. a DTMFAggregator) behaves exactly as before.
  (PR #5030)

• Removed the pyyaml-include dependency (GPL-3.0), replacing it with a small built-in !include constructor for eval scenarios.
  (PR #5037)

• Updated tracing span attributes to the current OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions: gen_ai.provider.name is now azure.ai.openai (was az.ai.openai) for AzureLLMService, x_ai (was xai) for GrokLLMService, and mistral_ai (was mistral) for MistralLLMService; reasoning token usage is now reported as gen_ai.usage.reasoning.output_tokens (was gen_ai.usage.reasoning_tokens). Update any dashboards or queries filtering on the old values.
  (PR #5047)

• Changed OpenAI Realtime llm_response span attributes to standard OTel GenAI names: tokens.prompt/tokens.completion/tokens.total are now gen_ai.usage.input_tokens/gen_ai.usage.output_tokens, plus the new cached/audio breakdown attributes. Update any dashboards or queries filtering on the old tokens.* names.
  (PR #5050)

• Changed Gemini Live llm_response span attributes: the non-standard tokens.prompt/tokens.completion/tokens.total were removed in favor of the standard gen_ai.usage.input_tokens/gen_ai.usage.output_tokens attributes already present on the same spans. Update any dashboards or queries filtering on the old tokens.* names.
  (PR #5052)

• Updated the runner extra to require pipecat-ai-prebuilt>=1.0.4.
  (PR #5061)

• Updated the runner extra to require pipecat-ai-prebuilt>=1.0.5 to add support for the MoQ transport.
  (PR #5073)

• TTSService now logs Generating TTS [text] itself, just before invoking run_tts: at debug level in sentence aggregation mode and at trace level when streaming tokens (TextAggregationMode.TOKEN), where the accumulated turn text is already logged at debug level at flush time. The duplicate per-service logs — which logged every token at debug level in token mode — wereremoved from all TTS services.
  (PR #5079)

Deprecated

• Deprecated reset() on BaseUserTurnStartStrategy and BaseUserTurnStopStrategy. Strategy "reset" logic should now happen through the new handle_user_turn_started() / handle_user_turn_stopped() lifecycle callbacks. For backward compatibility for strategy implementers who haven't implemented the new methods yet: by default, both start and stop strategies' handle_user_turn_started() invoke reset(), and stop strategies' handle_user_turn_stopped() invoke reset(). Because of this, a custom strategy that extends the base class and still overrides reset() keeps working. Overriding reset() emits a DeprecationWarning when the class is defined. To be removed in 2.0.0.
  (PR #4967)

• Deprecated the webrtc extra's dependency on OpenCV. opencv-python-headless will be removed from the webrtc extra in 2.0.0. Video pipelines using SmallWebRTCTransport should startinstalling the new webrtc-video extra (pipecat-ai[webrtc-video]) instead.
  (PR #4978)

• Deprecated PronunciationDictionaryLocator and the pronunciation_dictionary_locators parameter on ElevenLabsTTSService and ElevenLabsHttpTTSService. Pronunciation dictionary substitutions can rewrite the spoken words in ways that no longer match the text sent to synthesis, which breaks the alignment-based word-completion tracking used to attribute spoken text back to the conversation context. Use the text_transforms parameter with replace_text (added in 1.5.0) instead — those transforms run client-side and are tracked correctly. Will be removed in2.0.0.
  (PR #4991)

Fixed

• Fixed Gemini thinking-mode parallel tool calls: the adapter now groups the matching function_response messages into a single turn alongside the merged function_call messages, so the response count matches the call count. The previous mismatch was rejected with a 400 by the Vertex AI endpoint (the Gemini Developer API currently tolerates it).
  (PR #4103)

• Fixed RTVIProcessor echoing the client's declared major version back in bot-ready when connected to a legacy 1.x RTVI client, so the client's aggregator picks the code path that matches the wire format the server observer is actually sending.
  (PR #4629)

• Fixed BaseWorker.send_job_stream_end not removing the finished job from _active_jobs. Streaming jobs stayed "active" after the stream ended, so a cancel or update that raced in afterwards was still processed (firing on_job_cancelled and sending a CANCELLED response for an already-completed job) and the job leaked until worker shutdown. It now clears the job like send_job_response does.
  (PR #4955)

• Fixed normalize_dates rendering the month name via the locale-sensitive strftime("%B"), which produced a mixed-language spoken date (e.g. "Mai 10th, two thousand and twenty-three") when the process locale was non-English. Month names are now always English, matching the rest of the spoken date.
  (PR #4956)

• Fixed SingleClientWebsocketServerTransport closing the client connection as soon as an EndFrame passed the input transport, cutting off output still being flushed downstream, such asa farewell spoken via TTSSpeakFrame or Pipecat Flows' end_conversation action text. The shared server is now reference-counted by the input and output transports and drained only once the last side has stopped, so the output finishes writing before the connection closes.
  (PR #4964)

• Fixed TurnAnalyzerUserTurnStopStrategy keeping stale speech state across externally-ended user turns. When a turn ended by any path other than the analyzer's own COMPLETE (a forced or external stop, or the stop watchdog timeout) while a mute strategy held audio back, the smart turn analyzer stayed frozen mid-speech and its stop_secs silence timer later fired a phantom end-of-turn during the bot's response (spurious on_user_turn_inference_triggered / on_user_turn_stopped, and with realtime services like Gemini Live a stray activity_end that could drop the user's next utterance). UserTurnController now notifies every stop strategy that the turn ended via a handle_user_turn_stopped() callback — on every stop path, never at turn start — and TurnAnalyzerUserTurnStopStrategy clears its analyzer there. The clear can't happen in the strategy's shared per-turn reset, which also runs at turn start, because that would drop the continuously-fed pre_speech_ms buffer; the buffer refills from incoming audio, so the next turn regains its full pre-speech context within pre_speech_ms of the clear, and only a user restarting within that window (about half a second) sees one prediction with a shortened lead-in.
  (PR #4967)

• Fixed DeepgramSTTService not reporting STT TTFB metrics when the finalize response has an empty transcript. When Deepgram's own endpointing fires before the Finalize command, the transcript is sent in a regular is_final response and the subsequent from_finalize=True response arrives with empty text. confirm_finalize() was inside the len(transcript) > 0 guard and was never called, so finalized was never set and stop_ttfb_metrics() fell through to the 2-second timeout — arriving after BotStartedSpeakingFrame and missing the UserBotLatencyObserver window.
  (PR #4973)

• Fixed TTS text replacements (text_transforms/text_filters, e.g. replace_text()) corrupting the conversation context in word-timestamp mode (e.g. CartesiaTTSService) when a replacement split one word into several ("BODYPUMP" → "body pump"), changed only case ("SQL" → "sql"), or changed only the connector between words ("BODYPUMP" → "body-pump"). Previously the spoken (replaced) text could leak into the LLM context instead of the original text, or be silently dropped. Acronym letter-spacing (e.g. "API" → "A P I") and inline IPA pronunciation tags had the same underlying issue and are fixed as well.
  (PR #4976)

• Fixed SmallWebRTCTransport importing OpenCV even for audio-only pipelines. cv2 is now imported lazily, only when a non-RGB video frame actually needs converting. The webrtc extra'sOpenCV dependency also switched from opencv-python to opencv-python-headless, avoiding GUI system library requirements.
  (PR #4978)

• Fixed SpeechTimeoutUserTurnStopStrategy ending the user turn mid-utterance when a new turn's reset() cleared VAD speaking state while the user was still talking without an intervening VADUserStoppedSpeakingFrame. A finalized transcript for a mid-utterance segment (as streaming STT services emit) was then treated as a standalone utterance with no active VAD reference,and user_speech_timeout falsely ended the turn. reset() now leaves VAD speaking state untouched, since it reflects live physical VAD state rather than turn-scoped bookkeeping.
  (PR #4983)

• Fixed ToolsSchemaAdapter and LLMContextAdapter dropping a ToolsSchema's custom_tools (e.g. Gemini's built-in google_search tool) when serializing an LLMContext for network bus transport, which broke provider-specific tools for distributed/multi-worker setups.
  (PR #4988)

• Fixed _send_tool_result() in the OpenAI, Inworld, and xAI (Grok) realtime LLM services double-JSON-encoding tool call results before sending them back to the model. Tool results were being serialized twice, so the model would receive a JSON string containing an escaped JSON string instead of the actual result.
  (PR #4988)

• Fixed the Anthropic and AWS Bedrock LLM adapters silently discarding the entire conversation when a single message failed to convert to the provider's format (e.g. a malformed image dataURL). The Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, and Gemini adapters now raise LLMContextConversionError, surfacing the real cause instead of a misleading downstream API error.
  (PR #4990)

• Fixed a small amount of audio being dropped from the end of every bot turn. BaseOutputTransport only flushed complete audio_out_10ms_chunks-sized chunks to the transport; any trailing audio shorter than one chunk was silently discarded when TTSStoppedFrame arrived, cutting off the last bit of speech (more noticeable with larger audio_out_10ms_chunks values). That leftover audio is now padded with silence and flushed before the stop frame is processed.
  (PR #4993)

• Fixed the multi_worker_handoff Flows example repeating the assistant's reply after handing control back to the router. It now hands off with NO_RESPONSE, preventing the newly-deactivated worker from responding.
  (PR #4995)

• Fixed word-completion tracking (used for bot text sync, interruptions, and text_transforms) to correctly handle SSML tags in TTS output, such as ElevenLabs' <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="..."> tag for custom pronunciations. Some TTS providers report a multi-attribute opening tag as several separate word-timestamp tokens (e.g. <phoneme, alphabet="ipa", ph="...">word); these fragments are now recognized as markup rather than being misrouted or prematurely completing a frame.
  (PR #5000)

• Fixed a bug where TTS output containing a lone < with no matching > (e.g. "5 < 10" or an emoticon like "<3") got silently truncated in the user-facing text and LLM context, because word-completion tracking treated it as the start of a truncated SSML tag. Ordinary text like this is now preserved in full; only genuine mid-tag word-timestamp fragments (e.g. a multi-attribute SSML tag split across several tokens by some TTS providers) are still treated as markup.
  (PR #5002)

• Fixed Google STT final results waiting for the fallback turn-stop timeout instead of finalizing immediately.
  (PR #5018)

• Fixed AnthropicLLMService and AWSBedrockLLMService failing with 400 invalid_request_error: This model does not support assistant message prefill on Claude 4.6 and newer models. Requests whose message list ends with an assistant message — a tool-call preamble committed after tool results, or a filter_incomplete_user_turns marker landing mid-turn — now automatically get a minimal . user message appended at request time. The stored LLMContext is never modified, and models that still support assistant prefill (claude-haiku-4-5 and older) are left untouched.
  (PR #5041)

• Fixed user turn-stop strategies ending a turn early when an STT service finalized a transcript mid-utterance. An interim transcription now clears the finalized-transcript fast-path, so atranscript finalized during a pause too short for VAD to report a stop no longer skips the STT safety-net timeout (or, with a turn analyzer, triggers the turn immediately) while the rest of the utterance is still being transcribed.
  (PR #5043)

• Fixed traced LLM turns losing their messages, tools, and system instruction span attributes (with an Error setting up LLM tracing: Object of type LLMSpecificMessage is not JSON serializable warning) when using OpenAIResponsesLLMService with reasoning enabled. Reasoning messages now appear in the traced LLM input with their encrypted_content elided.
  (PR #5047)

• Fixed TTS spans in OpenTelemetry traces missing some or all of the spoken text (regression in 1.2.0): with sentence aggregation, a turn's span only kept the last sentence's text and metrics.character_count, and for services that create their audio context inside run_tts (e.g. the ElevenLabs websocket path) the first sentence was dropped — leaving single-sentence turns with no text at all. Text from every run_tts call in an audio context now accumulates onto the span (joined text, summed character count), including text spoken before an interruption.
  (PR #5049)

• Fixed the Gemini Live llm_tool_result trace span never capturing any tool result attributes. The tracing decorator read the decorated _tool_result method's first positional argument as a dict of result fields, but that argument is the tool_call_id string, so tool.call_id, tool.function_name, tool.result, and tool.result_status were silently dropped. The decorator now reads the method's positional arguments (tool_call_id, tool_call_name, result) directly.
  (PR #5051)

• Fixed Gemini Live tracing logging Error extracting context system instructions: 'LLMContext' object has no attribute 'extract_system_instructions' on every setup span and never capturing the system instruction. llm_setup spans now emit the standard gen_ai.system_instructions attribute, resolved the same way as for other LLM services: the service's settings.system_instruction takes priority, falling back to an initial system message in the context.
  (PR #5053)

• Fixed TTS word-timestamp tracking and RTVI progress reporting when using TextAggregationMode.TOKEN. Previously, streaming tokens directly to the TTS service bypassed sentence-level tracking, so word-timestamp services and RTVI clients did not receive correct spoken_status/progress events. Streamed tokens are now regrouped into sentences internally, producing the same per-sentence progress frames and word-completion tracking as TextAggregationMode.SENTENCE.
  (PR #5066)

• Fixed TTSService applying append_trailing_space in TextAggregationMode.TOKEN: appending a space to every token could split words across tokens on services that preserve inter-message whitespace (e.g. RimeTTSService). The trailing space is now applied in sentence aggregation mode only.
  (PR #5067)

• Fixed TTS word-level captions dropping or misplacing terminal punctuation for languages that put a space before ? ! : ; (e.g. French "Comment ça va ?"). The punctuation arrives as its own word-timestamp token, which was being orphaned when the caption was marked complete on the preceding word — dropping the mark from the committed caption, and (for mid-sentence :/ ;) showing it a word late in progressive captions. The caption now stays open until the punctuation token arrives and drains it in place.
  (PR #5089)

• Fixed an issue where XAIHttpTTSService could intermittently crash the audio playback task and leave the bot mute for the rest of the session (buffer size must be a multiple of elementsize). xAI's /v1/tts endpoint chops its PCM stream at arbitrary byte boundaries, so a chunk could end mid-sample; the service now emits only whole 16-bit samples.
  (PR #5090)

Other

• Corrected the return type annotation of BaseLLMAdapter.from_standard_tools() to list[Any] | NotGiven | None, reflecting that tools passed in as None are returned unchanged. Improves type-checking accuracy for code built on custom adapters; no runtime behavior change.
  (PR #5078)