Deepgram to acquire voice and video technology company Daily

Deepgram announced Thursday that it will acquire Daily, which develops technology for voice AI. Daily created and is the primary developer of Pipecat, a popular open-source platform that handles real-time voice and video. The value of the deal was not disclosed, but Pipecat will remain open source.

Pipecat is a software platform that manages voice and video streams. It brings together speech-to-text systems, large language models, and text-to-speech tools, reducing the system's response latency. Daily also has a ready-to-use server system for building voice and video calling services.

Daily has raised more than $62 million (approximately AZN 105.4 million) in investment to date. The company's investors include Tiger Global, Highfield Capital, Nat Friedman, Lachy Groom, and Kevin Weil. Deepgram reached unicorn status after raising $130 million (AZN 221 million) in a Series C round earlier this year. Both companies participated in the same Y Combinator program in 2016.

Daily co-founder Kwindla Kramer said work on Pipecat began after GPT-4 was released. The team was testing how AI could communicate with people through voice and text. Kramer's main requirements were that the platform always remain open source and independent of any technology provider. Following the acquisition, developers will be able to combine different models to create AI agents capable of holding conversations.

Deepgram and the Pipecat team have also developed an open protocol called the Real-Time Context Standard. RCS defines how voice AI agents recognize signals such as whispering in an audio stream. The protocol establishes rules for passing this information to the language model and determining the manner in which the response is delivered. Deepgram plans to use this technology to expand into real-time communication formats beyond voice.