pipecat/examples/phone-chatbot/README.md

 

Phone Chatbot

Example project that demonstrates how to add phone funtionality to your Pipecat bots. We include examples for Daily (bot_daily.py) dial-in and dial-out, and Twilio (bot_twilio.py) dial-in, depending on who you want to use as a phone vendor.

• 🔁 Transport: Daily WebRTC
• 💬 Speech-to-Text: Deepgram via Daily transport
• 🤖 LLM: GPT4-o / OpenAI
• 🔉 Text-to-Speech: ElevenLabs

Should I use Daily or Twilio as a vendor?

If you're starting from scratch, using Daily to provision phone numbers alongside Daily as a transport offers some convenience (such as automatic call forwarding.)

If you already have Twilio numbers and workflows that you want to connect to your Pipecat bots, there is some additional configuration required (you'll need to create a on_dialin_ready and use the Twilio client to trigger the forward.)

You can read more about this, as well as see respective walkthroughs in our docs.

Setup

1. Create and activate a virtual environment:

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
   

2. Install requirements:

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

3. Copy env.example to .env and configure:

   cp env.example .env
   

4. Install ngrok so your local server can receive requests from Daily's servers.

Using Daily numbers

Running the example

To run either the dial-in or dial-out example, follow these steps to get started:

1. Run bot_runner.py to handle incoming HTTP requests:

   python bot_runner.py --host localhost
   

2. Start ngrok running in a terminal window:

   ngrok http --domain yourdomain.ngrok.app 8000
   

3. In a different terminal window, run the Daily bot file:

   python bot_daily.py
   

Dial-in

To dial-in to the bot, you will need to enable dial-in for your Daily domain. Follow this guide to set up your domain.

Note: For the room_creation_api property, point at your ngrok hostname: "room_creation_api": "https://yourdomain.ngrok.app/daily_start_bot".

Once your domain is configured, receiving a phone call at a number associated with your Daily account will result in a POST to the /daily_start_bot endpoint, which will start a bot session.

Dial-out

For the bot to dial out to a number, make a POST request to /daily_start_bot and include the dial-out phone number in the body of the request as dialoutNumber.

For example:

curl -X "POST" "http://localhost:7860/daily_start_bot" \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8' \
     -d $'{
  "dialoutNumber": "+12125551234"
}'

Voicemail detection

To start the bot and test voicemail detection, send a POST request to /daily_start_bot with "detectVoicemail": true in the request body.

• If you only include "detectVoicemail": true, the bot will not dial out. Instead, you can test it in Daily Prebuilt by visiting the URL provided in the response.
• If you include both "detectVoicemail": true and a phone number under "dialoutNumber", the bot will dial out to that number.

Example: Testing in Daily Prebuilt:

curl -X POST "http://localhost:7860/daily_start_bot" \                                                                                                        py pipecat
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"detectVoicemail": true}'

Example: Testing with Dial-Out:

curl -X POST "http://localhost:7860/daily_start_bot" \                                                                                                        py pipecat
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"dialoutNumber": "+18057145330", "detectVoicemail": true}'

More information

For more configuration options, please consult Daily's API documentation.

Using Twilio numbers

Running the example

Follow these steps to get started:

1. Run bot_runner.py to handle incoming HTTP requests:

   python bot_runner.py --host localhost
   

2. Start ngrok running in a terminal window:

   ngrok http --domain yourdomain.ngrok.app 8000
   

3. In a different terminal window, run the Daily bot file:

   python bot_twilio.py
   

As above, but target the following URL:

POST /twilio_start_bot

For more configuration options, please consult Twilio's API documentation.

Deployment example

A Dockerfile is included in this demo for convenience. Here is an example of how to build and deploy your bot to fly.io.

Please note: This demo spawns agents as subprocesses for convenience / demonstration purposes. You would likely not want to do this in production as it would limit concurrency to available system resources. For more information on how to deploy your bots using VMs, refer to the Pipecat documentation.

Build the docker image

docker build -t tag:project .

Launch the fly project

mv fly.example.toml fly.toml

fly launch (using the included fly.toml)

Setup your secrets on Fly

Set the necessary secrets (found in env.example)

fly secrets set DAILY_API_KEY=... OPENAI_API_KEY=... ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=... ELEVENLABS_VOICE_ID=...

If you're using Twilio as a number vendor:

fly secrets set TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID=... TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=...

Deploy!

fly deploy

Need to do something more advanced?

This demo covers the basics of bot telephony. If you want to know more about working with PSTN / SIP, please ping us on Discord!