Deepgram, the voice AI infrastructure company built for the demands of real-world conversation, today announced that it is acquiring Daily, creators of Pipecat, the world’s most popular open-source voice agent framework. Pipecat’s open, vendor-neutral ecosystem puts open source at the heart of Deepgram’s strategy to help developers build production-scale voice AI. Daily’s global real-time network infrastructure connects end users to voice agents with ultra-low latency and high reliability. With Pipecat and Daily underpinning Deepgram’s new Voice Agent Platform, alongside Deepgram’s speech models, Deepgram will offer the first complete, open, production-grade platform for conversational voice AI, so developers can build and scale reliable agents while keeping control over their architecture and model choice.

The Pipecat framework will remain fully open source and free to all developers under its existing BSD V2 license. Together with many of the organizations that have contributed to and use Pipecat, the companies are establishing an independent Pipecat Foundation. Deepgram will invest in Pipecat’s continued development and community while keeping all of Pipecat open source and vendor neutral, letting developers choose and combine models, tools, network transport, and APIs from different providers. Following the acquisition, the Daily team will join Deepgram.

“Keeping Pipecat open was fundamental to our decision to join Deepgram,” said Kwindla Hultman Kramer, co-founder of Daily, who joins Deepgram as the new Head of Open Source. “Deepgram has always been the voice AI company that takes production seriously, and their commitment to keeping Pipecat open is rooted in a belief, which I share, that the future of voice depends on developers being free to combine the best ideas from across the industry and build on each other’s work.”

“Kwin and the Daily team deeply understand what it takes to keep a live conversation working reliably, and Pipecat gives developers the freedom to build with the models they choose,” said Scott Stephenson, CEO and co-founder of Deepgram. “Acquiring Daily allows us to bring that expertise together to tackle the whole voice system and give developers a faster path from prototype to production.”

Connecting all of the pieces of the voice AI stack is the first part of the job. Making sure those pieces share context and the information needed to carry a conversation forward is a separate challenge.

Introducing the Real-Time Context Standard: an open protocol that keeps the conversation flowing

At Deepgram Speak today in San Francisco, Stephenson will also introduce the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol co-developed with the Pipecat team. RCS addresses a gap in today’s voice AI systems: the words get passed from one model to the next, but the rich audio context around them, like tone, who’s speaking and what’s happening in the background, gets lost along the way.

RCS defines three new types of metadata: context from the audio, such as a whisper or an unclear word; instructions for how a language model should use those signals; and guidance for how the response should sound. That lets an agent ask for clarification when it didn’t hear clearly or respond quietly to someone whispering. Adapters translate those signals and delivery instructions for each model, so developers can use the same approach with models from different providers.

“Too many teams treat voice AI as a feature to add late in the roadmap. In reality, it’s a distinct infrastructure discipline, with its own demands around latency, accuracy, and scale,” said Stephenson. “We’ve all seen a voice AI demo that makes the future feel close, only to fail the moment it’s needed. The real challenge is making that experience reliable when people actually depend on it. Our Real-Time Context Standard addresses what gets lost along the way.”

The Real-Time Context Standard is open and extensible. Deepgram invites developers, model providers, and teams building voice applications to help shape RCS by testing it in their own systems, sharing feedback and contributing to the specification.

Deepgram’s acquisition of Daily and the introduction of RCS set the stage for Deepgram’s broader platform vision: a complete set of tools that, together, make it easy for developers to build state of the art, human-like, enterprise-ready voice agents and conversational AI applications.

Later today at Speak, Chief Product Officer Ed Anuff will preview the forthcoming Deepgram Voice Agent Platform, which brings Deepgram’s models and Pipecat’s open infrastructure together to give developers an integrated path to production while preserving model choice. Anuff will also introduce two new models built for live conversation, along with expanded language support and a Global API designed to improve connection reliability and reduce latency.

Learn how to build with Real-Time Context Standard in Pipecat here and try the demo here. For updates on the Deepgram Voice Agent Platform, please contact us. Full technical details, demos and availability for the remainder of today’s product announcements will be published on Deepgram’s blog following Anuff’s keynote.

About Deepgram

Deepgram is bringing the world’s most natural interface—voice—to the technology we use every day. Its speech models and real-time infrastructure enable AI systems that keep up with the way people actually speak, powering conversational voice AI in production for more than 5,000 organizations globally. The Deepgram Voice Agent Platform brings together speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech capabilities, with voice-native foundation models available through cloud APIs or self-hosted and on-premises deployments. Built for accuracy, low latency and cost efficiency, Deepgram makes high-quality voice experiences practical to build and operate at scale. More than 650,000 developers have used Deepgram to process more than 200,000 years of audio. Learn more at deepgram.com, explore developer documentation, or follow Deepgram on X and LinkedIn.

About Daily / Pipecat

Daily built the real-time infrastructure layer that enterprise voice and video AI requires — a global network of 75 points of presence engineered for the latency and reliability demands of live AI. Pipecat, Daily’s open-source voice agent framework, is the most widely-used orchestration layer for production voice AI, with integrations across every major model provider, telephony system, and deployment environment. Pipecat is maintained at pipecat.ai and on GitHub under BSD V2 license.

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