Pipecat Subagents is a distributed multi-agent framework for Pipecat. Each agent runs its own Pipecat pipeline and communicates with other agents through a shared message bus, enabling you to decompose complex systems into specialized, coordinating agents that can run locally or across machines.

Whether local or distributed, the programming model is the same: create an AgentRunner, connect it to the bus, and add agents.

🧠 Why Pipecat Subagents?

Pipecat is a powerful real-time framework for building voice and multimodal AI applications. Pipecat Subagents extends it with distributed multi-agent coordination where each agent runs its own Pipecat pipeline.

Some things you can build:

• A customer support system where each specialist runs its own LLM with dedicated tools and context, transferring seamlessly between each other.
• A video game where multiple LLMs independently control different characters, environments, or game mechanics.
• A stock analysis app that dispatches parallel research to multiple worker agents and synthesizes their findings.
• A video or image analysis pipeline where worker agents process media using Pipecat processors and stream updates back.
• An IoT system where remote devices run agents on specialized hardware, reporting status and receiving commands.

If a single Pipecat pipeline covers your use case, you don't need subagents. When you outgrow it, the transition is straightforward: your existing pipeline becomes one agent among many.

✨ Features

• Per-agent pipeline: every agent runs its own Pipecat pipeline with access to all services, processors, and transports (e.g. different LLMs, local models, image analysis, custom processors).
• Agent handoff: transfer control between agents mid-conversation, seamlessly switching context and capabilities.
• Task coordination: dispatch work to specialized worker agents in parallel, track progress with timeouts and cancellation, and stream results back.
• Distributed agents: run agents across machines, scaling each independently. Agents communicate via a shared bus that works the same locally or over the network.
• Mixed agent types: combine free-form LLM agents with structured Pipecat Flows agents or wrap third-party frameworks as subagents.
• Agent lifecycle: activation, deactivation, error propagation, and graceful shutdown across a tree of agents.

📦 Installation

uv add pipecat-ai-subagents

# or: pip install pipecat-ai-subagents

Requires Python 3.11+ and Pipecat.

🚀 Examples

See the examples directory for complete, runnable demos.

🔍 Observability with Clowder

Clowder (a group of cats) is a real-time observability tool for Pipecat Subagents. It shows runners, agents, tasks, and bus messages in a web UI, whether local or distributed.

Adding Clowder to your system

Add a ClowderAgent to any runner:

from pipecat_subagents.clowder import ClowderAgent

clowder = ClowderAgent("clowder", bus=runner.bus, port=7070)
await runner.add_agent(clowder)

Or use a setup file to add Clowder without modifying your application code. Create a file (e.g. clowder_setup.py):

from pipecat_subagents.clowder import ClowderAgent
from pipecat_subagents.runner import AgentRunner


async def setup_runner(runner: AgentRunner):
    clowder = ClowderAgent(bus=runner.bus)
    await runner.add_agent(clowder)

Then set the environment variable:

export PIPECAT_SUBAGENTS_SETUP_FILES=/path/to/clowder_setup.py

Running the UI

cd clowder-ui
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173 and click Connect. The UI shows agents grouped by runner, tasks with live duration, and a filterable bus message stream. Connect at any time; all messages are buffered.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions from the community! Whether you're fixing bugs, improving documentation, or adding new features, here's how you can help:

• Found a bug? Open an issue
• Have a feature idea? Start a discussion
• Documentation improvements? Docs PRs are always welcome

Before submitting a pull request, please check existing issues and PRs to avoid duplicates.

We aim to review all contributions promptly and provide constructive feedback to help get your changes merged.

💬 Getting help

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➡️ Read the docs

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