{"slug": "livekit", "name": "LiveKit", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "", "recommenders": 10, "commenters": 27, "warners": 2, "score": 10.575, "rising": -1.95, "first": "2025-11-21", "latest": "2026-09-27", "why": "LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 10, "neutral": 14, "compare": 2, "warn": 2}, "spark": [1, 2, 5, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls.", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "livekit.io", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://livekit.io", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["LiveKit"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 796132593, "item_id": 49758287, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758287", "by": "U4E4", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls.", "excerpt": "I\u2019m not GP, but run something that\u2019s pretty close to GPs description. It\u2019s been a fun journey to set up. The core is chat+audio/video call server running locally on my m3 Mac Studio. Centrifugo has handled the chat concerns very well. LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls. There are a few different options for local STT if you want that. I used RN via expo for the client and have my friends a", "context": "runs local chat server on Mac Studio", "use_case": "video and audio calls", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"}, {"id": 782175394, "item_id": 48885962, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48885962", "by": "niothiel", "date": "2026-07-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.", "excerpt": "Happily continuing work on https://cardcast.gg. It's a way for my friends and I to play Magic: The Gathering online using a webcam. Spelltable has been neglected by WoTC, and we wanted more features, so I rolled my own (and learned some Computer Vision stuff in the process!) Most recently I rolled out automated card tracking, so there's no more need to click on cards to know what they are, they just automatically sca", "context": "", "use_case": "Real-time video for service", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"}, {"id": 781674753, "item_id": 48854672, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854672", "by": "niothiel", "date": "2026-07-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.", "excerpt": "Happily continuing work on https://cardcast.gg. It's a way for my friends and I to play Magic: The Gathering online using a webcam. Spelltable has been neglected by WoTC, and we wanted more features, so I rolled my own (and learned some Computer Vision stuff in the process!) Most recently I rolled out automated card tracking, so there's no more need to click on cards to know what they are, they just automatically sca", "context": "", "use_case": "Real-time video", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2026)"}, {"id": 748640048, "item_id": 46790003, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790003", "by": "clipsy", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the entire stack does indeed appear to be open source", "excerpt": "First, why are you talking about LiveKit? I see nothing in the article mentioning it, and with a bit of further digging I found another article elaborating on the new solution being developed in France: \"The French government has announced the full rollout of Visio, a domestically developed video conferencing platform that will replace Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and other non-European tools across all state administratio", "context": "", "use_case": "open-source video stack", "switched_from": "", "story": "France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams"}, {"id": 748616992, "item_id": 46788562, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788562", "by": "davidz", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "no reasons to put open stack in quotes", "excerpt": "no reasons to put open stack in quotes. code available under Apache-2 https://github.com/livekit/livekit", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 749991344, "item_id": 46874459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874459", "by": "euio757", "date": "2026-02-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version", "excerpt": "\"built their own\" wrapper yes (which is a very important piece of a end-to-end Zoom like product) But you can see: > Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/) Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack. Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past. If a EU entity forks it a", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US"}, {"id": 748610960, "item_id": 46788185, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788185", "by": "DyslexicAtheist", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "LiveKit, the \"open stack\" they rely on ties into VC-funded US tech used for border surveillance", "excerpt": "LiveKit, the \"open stack\" they rely on ties into VC-funded US tech used for border surveillance https://livekit.io/customers", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams"}]}], "who": [{"by": "U4E4", "context": "runs local chat server on Mac Studio", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758287", "date": "2026-09-18"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["voice agent sip/rtc", "video and audio calls", "real-time video for service", "real-time video", "real-time voice avatar", "video conferencing"], "compared": [{"slug": "jitsi", "name": "Jitsi", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "lemonslice", "name": "LemonSlice", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "matrix", "name": "Matrix", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "la-suite-meet", "name": "La Suite Meet", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "yjs", "name": "Yjs", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 799955904, "item_id": 49997244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49997244", "by": "mcapistrano", "date": "2026-10-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production.", "excerpt": "LiveKit|http://livekit.io/| VoiceAI | webRTC | Remote | Full Time LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production. Hiring: >> Product Engineer | NAMER, EMEA, APJ (Remote) or SF (Hybrid): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/livekit/463e2769-bb85-4429-96a3-3a175eb228cd?departmentId", "context": "LiveKit hiring post", "use_case": "voice AI agent infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)"}, {"id": 793121520, "item_id": 49570095, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49570095", "by": "mcapistrano", "date": "2026-09-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing.", "excerpt": "LiveKit|http://livekit.io/| VoiceAI | webRTC | Remote | Full Time LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production. Hiring: >> Product Engineer | NAMER, EMEA, APJ (Remote) or SF (Hybrid): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/livekit/463e2769-bb85-4429-96a3-3a175eb228cd >> Staff Sec", "context": "", "use_case": "voice AI infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026)"}, {"id": 787477104, "item_id": 49217319, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217319", "by": "mcapistrano", "date": "2026-08-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing.", "excerpt": "LiveKit|http://livekit.io/| VoiceAI | webRTC | Remote | Full Time LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production. Hiring: >> Staff Rust SDK Engineer (Remote, North America): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/livekit/a1d10340-7cd9-4029-9a56-139232f4bd5d >> Staff Security Engine", "context": "hiring", "use_case": "voice AI agents infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2026)"}, {"id": 781163152, "item_id": 48822697, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48822697", "by": "mcapistrano", "date": "2026-07-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing.", "excerpt": "LiveKit|http://livekit.io/| VoiceAI | webRTC | Remote | Full Time LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production. Hiring: >> Staff Developer Advocate - Community & Events: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/livekit/8ce9b064-e20b-4c71-8c53-385ea89299ae >> Staff Security Engineer", "context": "", "use_case": "voice AI infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)"}, {"id": 774283568, "item_id": 48392723, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392723", "by": "mcapistrano", "date": "2026-06-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production.", "excerpt": "LiveKit|http://livekit.io/| VoiceAI | webRTC | Remote | Full Time LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production. Hiring: >> Staff Rust SDK Engineer: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/livekit/a1d10340-7cd9-4029-9a56-139232f4bd5d >> Staff Security Engineer: https://jobs.ashbyhq", "context": "", "use_case": "voice AI agent infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 767660272, "item_id": 47978767, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978767", "by": "mcapistrano", "date": "2026-05-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing.", "excerpt": "LiveKit|http://livekit.io/| VoiceAI | webRTC | Remote | Full Time LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production. Hiring: >> Forward Deployed Engineer: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/livekit/b889ef16-4d5d-4b71-b0a9-682026a0a1ee >> Developer Success Engineer: https://jobs.as", "context": "", "use_case": "voice AI and WebRTC agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668", "title": "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788137", "title": "France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039674", "title": "Proton Meet", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923736", "title": "France's homegrown open source online office suite", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783600", "title": "Show HN: LemonSlice \u2013 Give your voice agents a face", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922569", "title": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 2}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 4, "warn": 1}, "2026-02": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 2}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-08": {"compare": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 797914944, "item_id": 49869684, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49869684", "by": "adrianssebuliba", "date": "2026-09-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "real LiveKit + Twilio SIP call", "excerpt": "I've been building and testing voice AI agents for a book, and ran into something that surprised me enough to give it its own chapter. Call a voice agent and press digits on your keypad. In the pipeline I tested, if the agent listens through a speech-to-text model, it hears nothing: across 6 real calls of nothing but touch-tone keypresses, the transcriber produced zero transcript and never even triggered voice-activi", "context": "", "use_case": "Voice agent SIP/RTC", "switched_from": "", "story": "Touch-tone digits produced zero output in the STT pipeline I tested"}, {"id": 796132593, "item_id": 49758287, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758287", "by": "U4E4", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls.", "excerpt": "I\u2019m not GP, but run something that\u2019s pretty close to GPs description. It\u2019s been a fun journey to set up. The core is chat+audio/video call server running locally on my m3 Mac Studio. Centrifugo has handled the chat concerns very well. LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls. There are a few different options for local STT if you want that. I used RN via expo for the client and have my friends a", "context": "runs local chat server on Mac Studio", "use_case": "video and audio calls", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"}, {"id": 789337953, "item_id": 49333622, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333622", "by": "abdik", "date": "2026-08-17", "stance": "compare", "quote": "The main difference from gateway is", "excerpt": "The main difference from gateway is we help with picking the right voice stack, which seems to be a big problem for users: we benchmark the models continuously and route based on those measurements for your language and constraints, and the boards are public at https://benchmarks.speko.ai/ Second difference is where it runs. Our gateway is open source and runs in your own container, including with self-hosted livekit", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Launch HN: Speko (YC S26) \u2013 OpenRouter for Voice AI"}, {"id": 785822323, "item_id": 49113895, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113895", "by": "jonesy827", "date": "2026-07-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It uses Telnyx SIP and LiveKit cloud", "excerpt": "I started using herdr last night, and was able to get a workflow I've wanted to set up for a while working, which is to be able to talk to a managing agent in my car and check on / update claude sessions. It uses Telnyx SIP and LiveKit cloud, and I'm using Qwen3.6 35B-A3B quite successfully as the voice layer router. It's still very early but it works quite well. If you decide to try it out, please make sure to read ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Agent-Manager: A Tmux TUI for Running Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode"}, {"id": 782175394, "item_id": 48885962, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48885962", "by": "niothiel", "date": "2026-07-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.", "excerpt": "Happily continuing work on https://cardcast.gg. It's a way for my friends and I to play Magic: The Gathering online using a webcam. Spelltable has been neglected by WoTC, and we wanted more features, so I rolled my own (and learned some Computer Vision stuff in the process!) Most recently I rolled out automated card tracking, so there's no more need to click on cards to know what they are, they just automatically sca", "context": "", "use_case": "Real-time video for service", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"}, {"id": 781674753, "item_id": 48854672, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854672", "by": "niothiel", "date": "2026-07-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.", "excerpt": "Happily continuing work on https://cardcast.gg. It's a way for my friends and I to play Magic: The Gathering online using a webcam. Spelltable has been neglected by WoTC, and we wanted more features, so I rolled my own (and learned some Computer Vision stuff in the process!) Most recently I rolled out automated card tracking, so there's no more need to click on cards to know what they are, they just automatically sca", "context": "", "use_case": "Real-time video", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2026)"}, {"id": 776480833, "item_id": 48530052, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530052", "by": "niothiel", "date": "2026-06-14", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I hope Livekit is good enough so solve that problem.", "excerpt": "I've been continuing work on cardcast.gg. It gives you the ability to play Magic: The Gathering with your friends remotely using a webcam. In the last month or so I added a few nifty features: - Auto-scan functionality: Instead of having to click on cards to discover what they are, I can now do whole-frame detection on an interval (configurable), so players can mouse over the webcam stream of another player and autom", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 768769137, "item_id": 48048071, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48048071", "by": "ZoneZealot", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Proton Meet relies entirely on LiveKit Cloud (USA based)", "excerpt": "Proton Meet relies entirely on LiveKit Cloud (USA based) to run https://proton.me/meet/privacy-policy LiveKit Cloud uses virtual compute and networking across multiple (USA based) cloud providers. DigitalOcean, Google and Oracle at minimum. They each have servers all of the world of course, but the controlling entity(s) parent companies are all based in the USA. Latency shouldn\u2019t be a problem, it's handled by a globa", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Proton Meet"}, {"id": 768768833, "item_id": 48048052, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48048052", "by": "ZoneZealot", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Proton Meet relies entirely on LiveKit Cloud to run", "excerpt": "Proton Meet relies entirely on LiveKit Cloud to run https://proton.me/meet/privacy-policy which uses virtual compute and networking with DigitalOcean, Google and Oracle.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Proton Meet"}, {"id": 762005760, "item_id": 47625360, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625360", "by": "holtwick", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "For small groups SFU like Livekit is not needed at all.", "excerpt": "For small groups SFU like Livekit is not needed at all. Still E2E and realtime collab. I wrote such a thing: https://brie.fi/ng", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Proton Meet Isn't What They Told You It Was"}, {"id": 755577745, "item_id": 47223609, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223609", "by": "arbayi", "date": "2026-03-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "We used LemonSlice, LiveKit, and ElevenLabs.", "excerpt": "For a fun side project, we built a quick demo to interview our OpenClaw agent called Mahmut. We used LemonSlice, LiveKit, and ElevenLabs. We just shared the full interview, and here's the repo if anyone is interested in building the same thing: https://github.com/openserv-labs/openclaw-voice-avatar Our avatar was a really hard one to handle, but I think it's still really good. All we did was connect the APIs. LemonSl", "context": "", "use_case": "real-time voice avatar", "switched_from": "", "story": "We Interviewed Our OpenClaw Agent Using a Voice Avatar"}, {"id": 750923489, "item_id": 46932718, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932718", "by": "smartbit", "date": "2026-02-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Last week\u2019s presentation on Docs, bloknotejs & Yjs https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DC97FQ-building_digital_workplace_solutions_on_top_of_foundational_libraries_blocknote_/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France's homegrown open source online office suite"}, {"id": 750793218, "item_id": 46924576, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46924576", "by": "YousefED", "date": "2026-02-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "LiveKit powers Visio", "excerpt": "Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / T", "context": "", "use_case": "Video conferencing", "switched_from": "", "story": "France's homegrown open source online office suite"}, {"id": 749991344, "item_id": 46874459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874459", "by": "euio757", "date": "2026-02-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version", "excerpt": "\"built their own\" wrapper yes (which is a very important piece of a end-to-end Zoom like product) But you can see: > Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/) Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack. Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past. If a EU entity forks it a", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US"}, {"id": 748678960, "item_id": 46792435, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792435", "by": "davidz", "date": "2026-01-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "we gotchu: https://docs.livekit.io/agents/models/tts/inference/inworld/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: LemonSlice \u2013 Give your voice agents a face"}, {"id": 748640048, "item_id": 46790003, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790003", "by": "clipsy", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the entire stack does indeed appear to be open source", "excerpt": "First, why are you talking about LiveKit? I see nothing in the article mentioning it, and with a bit of further digging I found another article elaborating on the new solution being developed in France: \"The French government has announced the full rollout of Visio, a domestically developed video conferencing platform that will replace Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and other non-European tools across all state administratio", "context": "", "use_case": "open-source video stack", "switched_from": "", "story": "France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams"}, {"id": 748616992, "item_id": 46788562, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788562", "by": "davidz", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "no reasons to put open stack in quotes", "excerpt": "no reasons to put open stack in quotes. code available under Apache-2 https://github.com/livekit/livekit", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams"}, {"id": 748610960, "item_id": 46788185, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788185", "by": "DyslexicAtheist", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "LiveKit, the \"open stack\" they rely on ties into VC-funded US tech used for border surveillance", "excerpt": "LiveKit, the \"open stack\" they rely on ties into VC-funded US tech used for border surveillance https://livekit.io/customers", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams"}, {"id": 748591569, "item_id": 46786973, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46786973", "by": "tmshapland", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Here's the link to the LiveKit LemonSlice plugin.", "excerpt": "Here's the link to the LiveKit LemonSlice plugin. It's very easy to get started. https://docs.livekit.io/agents/models/avatar/plugins/lemonslice/", "context": "", "use_case": "Realtime voice agent framework", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: LemonSlice \u2013 Give your voice agents a face"}, {"id": 748465760, "item_id": 46779110, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779110", "by": "Signez", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "a great open source (MIT licensed) product written in Go", "excerpt": "Nah, it's just a basic case of a pivot from a company that previously offered a great open source (MIT licensed) product written in Go that offer WebRTC-based backbone to build audio and video sharing products upon: https://github.com/livekit/livekit The AI stuff that the original LiveKit company put on top of it (to pivot to more investor-friendly endeavours) is not that relevant in this case, in my humble opinion.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."}, {"id": 748448000, "item_id": 46778000, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46778000", "by": "edwcross", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It says \"powered by LiveKit\"", "excerpt": "It says \"powered by LiveKit\": https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."}, {"id": 748299827, "item_id": 46768739, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768739", "by": "mcoliver", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Visio with live kit", "excerpt": "Visio with live kit (part of lasuite) or opendesk with jitsi would be my guess. https://livekit.io/ https://www.clever.cloud/product/visio/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://jitsi.org/ https://www.opendesk.eu/en As an aside I am surprised it has taken this long but seems inevitable now given the last 18 months.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."}, {"id": 748290160, "item_id": 46768135, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768135", "by": "0xADD1E", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "You mean something like LiveKit", "excerpt": "You mean something like LiveKit, with a basic implementation of user management etc such as https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet ?", "context": "", "use_case": "Real-time video infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."}, {"id": 748257312, "item_id": 46766082, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766082", "by": "theflash666_", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It's based on https://github.com/livekit.", "excerpt": "It's based on https://github.com/livekit.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Major roll out of LaSuite Meet in the French administration"}, {"id": 747857120, "item_id": 46741070, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741070", "by": "ripped_britches", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "speech to speech is not nearly as good as livekit IMO", "excerpt": "speech to speech is not nearly as good as livekit IMO (\"old school\" sequence of transcribe, LLM, synthesize). depends on what you're doing of course, but this is just because the LLMs are just way smarter than the speech to speech models which are pretty much the worst (again IMO) at anything beyond basic banter. and livekit is just a framework so you can hook it up with any models in the stack. im not an expert on t", "context": "", "use_case": "voice agent pipeline", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?"}, {"id": 742371986, "item_id": 46398249, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398249", "by": "ldenoue", "date": "2025-12-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Or PipeCat Cloud / LiveKit cloud", "excerpt": "Check out something like LayerCode (Cloudflare based). Or PipeCat Cloud / LiveKit cloud (I think they charge 1 cent per minute?)", "context": "", "use_case": "Real-time voice infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Asterisk AI Voice Agent"}, {"id": 739038403, "item_id": 46189900, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189900", "by": "a6kme", "date": "2025-12-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "when we switched to OSS stacks (Pipecat, LiveKit), we realise that even with great OSS, the plumbing was still painful", "excerpt": "Earlier I was using other platforms for production voice agents. One thing that became obvious was the cost: 60\u201370% of our total spend was the Vapi platform fee, and only 30-40% was actual LLM/STT/TTS usage. Platform cost dominated everything. That alone pushed us toward something self-hosted. But when we switched to OSS stacks (Pipecat, LiveKit), we realise that even with great OSS, the plumbing was still painful an", "context": "", "use_case": "voice agents", "switched_from": "Vapi", "story": "Show HN: Dograh \u2013 an OSS Vapi alternative to quickly build and test voice agents"}, {"id": 738785713, "item_id": 46174107, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46174107", "by": "HamounKarami", "date": "2025-12-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "livekit handles the webrtc video/audio (it\u2019s been rock solid)", "excerpt": "thanks! windowing: using a transparent nswindow hosting swiftui views for the floating call ui, and nspopover for the menu bar dropdown. we also toggle nsapp.activationpolicy to hide the dock icon when it's just running in the background networking: livekit handles the webrtc video/audio (it\u2019s been rock solid), with firebase cloud functions generating the tokens and firestore handling the signaling and presence state", "context": "", "use_case": "WebRTC video and audio", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: KnockKnock \u2013 Circular video calls that bring you closer, faster(macOS)"}, {"id": 737770644, "item_id": 46110665, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110665", "by": "pelzatessa", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "also recently added livekit and MAS for element call", "excerpt": "Been selfhosting synapse for about 1.5 years in a docker compose setup using bunkerweb (formerly \"bunkerized nginx\", which better explains it premise) reverse proxy, eturnal for TURN and postgres, also recently added livekit and MAS for element call and element X compatibility. All that runs on a small 2vcore/4gb VPS, and it runs pretty good, I experience a server crash every half a month, but that may be caused by t", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years"}, {"id": 736652992, "item_id": 46040812, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46040812", "by": "kraddypatties", "date": "2025-11-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Livekit + a few backend components hosted in Modal", "excerpt": "Thanks for trying it out! Yea that latency makes sense; \"listening\" includes turn detection and STT, \"thinking\" LLM + TTS _and then_ our model, so the pipeline latency stacks up pretty quick. The actual video model starts streaming out frames <500ms from the TTS generation, but we're still working on reducing latency from parts of the pipeline that we are using off the shelf. We have a high level blog post here https", "context": "", "use_case": "WebRTC agent infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Realtime, expressive AI personas that you can video call"}, {"id": 736053475, "item_id": 46003342, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003342", "by": "solomonayoola", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "compare", "quote": "LiveKit: WebRTC infrastructure", "excerpt": "Hey HN, I'm building EchoStack \u2014 a voice AI platform with a different abstraction layer than existing solutions. The Technical Approach: Most voice AI platforms are \"tool providers\": Voiceflow: Visual flow builder Retell: Agent SDK + runtime Bland.ai: API-first orchestration LiveKit: WebRTC infrastructure EchoStack is \"outcome provider\": We ship manifest-driven playbooks that handle the entire voice AI stack. Archite", "context": "", "use_case": "WebRTC infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "EchoStack: Manifest-driven voice AI playbooks (Stripe Checkout model for voice)"}]}