LiveKit provides open-source infrastructure and a cloud platform for real-time audio, video, and physical AI agent applications. Founded in 2021, the platform originated as a WebRTC-based media server with accompanying SDKs, addressing fundamental gaps in developer tooling for low-latency communication systems. The architecture now supports multimodal AI interactions across web, mobile, and embedded devices, with client libraries spanning Python, Node.js, and C++, deployed on Kubernetes infrastructure.
The platform handles edge cases inherent to real-time systems - network variability, codec negotiation, and state synchronization across distributed endpoints. For robotics applications, LiveKit bridges the software-hardware boundary by enabling bidirectional communication between AI agents and physical systems, supporting voice interfaces and sensor data streams with sub-second latency requirements. The system processes billions of calls annually and powers OpenAI's ChatGPT voice mode, demonstrating field-proven reliability at scale.
Over 200,000 developers use LiveKit, spanning AI research labs, robotics teams, and Fortune 500 deployments. The open-source model allows teams to validate the stack against their specific constraints - whether bandwidth limitations in mobile robotics, multi-agent coordination requirements, or integration with existing perception pipelines - before committing to production infrastructure.