Deepgram Acquires Daily: Pipecat Stays Open Source as the Two 2016 Y Combinator Companies Combine
Voice AI infrastructure company Deepgram announced on October 29, at its inaugural Deepgram Speak event in San Francisco, that it is acquiring Daily, the real-time audio and video infrastructure company behind Pipecat, which Deepgram calls the world's most popular open-source voice agent framework. The companies did not disclose the price.
Deepgram said Pipecat and Daily's global real-time network will underpin its new Voice Agent Platform alongside its own speech models, forming what it described as the first complete, open, production-grade platform for conversational voice AI, letting developers build and scale agents while keeping control over their architecture and model choice. Daily's global network has 75 points of presence engineered for the latency and reliability demands of live AI.
Following the acquisition, the Daily team will join Deepgram. Daily co-founder Kwindla Hultman Kramer joins as Head of Open Source. 'Keeping Pipecat open was fundamental to our decision to join Deepgram,' Kramer said. Deepgram CEO and co-founder Scott Stephenson said Kramer and the Daily team deeply understand what it takes to keep a live conversation working reliably, and that acquiring Daily brings that expertise together to tackle the whole voice system and give developers a faster path from prototype to production.
Pipecat will remain fully open source and free to all developers under its existing BSD license. Together with many of the organizations that have contributed to and use Pipecat, the companies are establishing an independent Pipecat Foundation, and Deepgram said it will invest in Pipecat's continued development and community while keeping it open source and vendor neutral, so developers can combine models, tools, network transport and APIs from different providers. Deepgram will also sell, support and develop all of Daily's current products and services, including WebRTC, telephony and cross-platform libraries.
At the same event, Stephenson introduced the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol co-developed with the Pipecat team. Deepgram said today's voice systems pass words from one model to the next but lose the rich audio context around them, such as tone, who is speaking and what is happening in the background. RCS defines three new types of metadata — context from the audio, instructions for how a language model should use those signals, and guidance for how the response should sound — so an agent can ask for clarification when it did not hear clearly or respond quietly to someone whispering.
Deepgram said its speech models and real-time infrastructure power conversational voice AI in production for more than 5,000 organizations globally, and that more than 650,000 developers have used its technology to process more than 200,000 years of audio. Daily had raised more than $62 million from investors including Tiger Global, according to PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch, and Deepgram reached unicorn status earlier this year with a $130 million Series C round. Both companies were in the same Y Combinator batch in 2016.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：San Francisco 市中心航拍（资料图），Deepgram 10月29日在该市首届 Speak 大会宣布收购 Daily。照片：Spicypepper999，CC0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Downtown San Francisco from the air (file photo). Photo by Spicypepper999, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
