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Overview

Pipecat is an open-source Python framework for realtime voice agents. Cartesia is available as a first-party provider plugin for TTS and STT services in the Pipecat repo.

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Prerequisites

Pipecat’s examples require a recent Python installation (see the Pipecat repo’s root-level README for current prerequisites). Install the pipecat-ai Python package with the cartesia extra for TTS/STT (bracket syntax): 
pip install "pipecat-ai[cartesia]"
You’d also need to choose the transport extras your sample needs - you can do this by matching whatever the upstream README lists for that example.

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Getting Started

Integrating Cartesia is as simple as importing Cartesia services and plugging them into your agent:
CartesiaTurnsSTTService requires pipecat-ai[cartesia]>=1.3.0.
We strongly recommend it over the older CartesiaSTTService for improved turn detection.
from pipecat.services.cartesia.tts import CartesiaTTSService
from pipecat.services.cartesia.turns.stt import CartesiaTurnsSTTService

stt = CartesiaTurnsSTTService(
    api_key=os.environ.get("CARTESIA_API_KEY"),
)

tts = CartesiaTTSService(
    api_key=os.environ.get("CARTESIA_API_KEY"),
)

# add cartesia stt and tts to your existing pipeline
pipeline = Pipeline(
    [
        transport.input(),
        stt,
        user_aggregator,
        llm,
        tts,
        transport.output(),
        assistant_aggregator,
    ]
)

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Basic Example

Check out /examples/voice/voice-cartesia-turns.py in the pipecat-ai/pipecat repo for a fully working voice agent. 
# clone and setup pipecat-ai/pipecat
git clone git@github.com:pipecat-ai/pipecat.git
cd pipecat
uv sync

# run with required API keys:
# - CARTESIA_API_KEY
# - OPENAI_API_KEY
uv run examples/voice/voice-cartesia-turns.py

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Advanced Example

You can take advantage of Ink’s turn.eager_end events to start generating an agent response slightly earlier than normal. This can cut around half a second off your latency, making your agent more human-like.

Speculative User Aggregator

How to use on_turn_eager_end from CartesiaTurnsSTTService