Quickstart

Prerequisites

Make sure you've followed the base quickstart instructions for the Agents SDK, and set up a virtual environment. Then, install the optional voice dependencies from the SDK:

pip install 'openai-agents[voice]'

Concepts

The main concept to know about is a VoicePipeline, which is a 3 step process:

1. Run a speech-to-text model to turn audio into text.
2. Run your code, which is usually an agentic workflow, to produce a result.
3. Run a text-to-speech model to turn the result text back into audio.

graph LR
    %% Input
    A["🎤 Audio Input"]

    %% Voice Pipeline
    subgraph Voice_Pipeline [Voice Pipeline]
        direction TB
        B["Transcribe (speech-to-text)"]
        C["Your Code"]:::highlight
        D["Text-to-speech"]
        B --> C --> D
    end

    %% Output
    E["🎧 Audio Output"]

    %% Flow
    A --> Voice_Pipeline
    Voice_Pipeline --> E

    %% Custom styling
    classDef highlight fill:#ffcc66,stroke:#333,stroke-width:1px,font-weight:700;

Agents

First, let's set up some Agents. This should feel familiar to you if you've built any agents with this SDK. We'll have a couple of Agents, a handoff, and a tool.

import asyncio
import random

from agents import (
    Agent,
    function_tool,
)
from agents.extensions.handoff_prompt import prompt_with_handoff_instructions



@function_tool
def get_weather(city: str) -> str:
    """Get the weather for a given city."""
    print(f"[debug] get_weather called with city: {city}")
    choices = ["sunny", "cloudy", "rainy", "snowy"]
    return f"The weather in {city} is {random.choice(choices)}."


spanish_agent = Agent(
    name="Spanish",
    handoff_description="A spanish speaking agent.",
    instructions=prompt_with_handoff_instructions(
        "You're speaking to a human, so be polite and concise. Speak in Spanish.",
    ),
    model="gpt-4o-mini",
)

agent = Agent(
    name="Assistant",
    instructions=prompt_with_handoff_instructions(
        "You're speaking to a human, so be polite and concise. If the user speaks in Spanish, handoff to the spanish agent.",
    ),
    model="gpt-4o-mini",
    handoffs=[spanish_agent],
    tools=[get_weather],
)

Voice pipeline

We'll set up a simple voice pipeline, using SingleAgentVoiceWorkflow as the workflow.

from agents.voice import SingleAgentVoiceWorkflow, VoicePipeline
pipeline = VoicePipeline(workflow=SingleAgentVoiceWorkflow(agent))

Run the pipeline

import numpy as np
import sounddevice as sd
from agents.voice import AudioInput

# For simplicity, we'll just create 3 seconds of silence
# In reality, you'd get microphone data
buffer = np.zeros(24000 * 3, dtype=np.int16)
audio_input = AudioInput(buffer=buffer)

result = await pipeline.run(audio_input)

# Create an audio player using `sounddevice`
player = sd.OutputStream(samplerate=24000, channels=1, dtype=np.int16)
player.start()

# Play the audio stream as it comes in
async for event in result.stream():
    if event.type == "voice_stream_event_audio":
        player.write(event.data)

Put it all together

import asyncio
import random

import numpy as np
import sounddevice as sd

from agents import (
    Agent,
    function_tool,
    set_tracing_disabled,
)
from agents.voice import (
    AudioInput,
    SingleAgentVoiceWorkflow,
    VoicePipeline,
)
from agents.extensions.handoff_prompt import prompt_with_handoff_instructions


@function_tool
def get_weather(city: str) -> str:
    """Get the weather for a given city."""
    print(f"[debug] get_weather called with city: {city}")
    choices = ["sunny", "cloudy", "rainy", "snowy"]
    return f"The weather in {city} is {random.choice(choices)}."


spanish_agent = Agent(
    name="Spanish",
    handoff_description="A spanish speaking agent.",
    instructions=prompt_with_handoff_instructions(
        "You're speaking to a human, so be polite and concise. Speak in Spanish.",
    ),
    model="gpt-4o-mini",
)

agent = Agent(
    name="Assistant",
    instructions=prompt_with_handoff_instructions(
        "You're speaking to a human, so be polite and concise. If the user speaks in Spanish, handoff to the spanish agent.",
    ),
    model="gpt-4o-mini",
    handoffs=[spanish_agent],
    tools=[get_weather],
)


async def main():
    pipeline = VoicePipeline(workflow=SingleAgentVoiceWorkflow(agent))
    buffer = np.zeros(24000 * 3, dtype=np.int16)
    audio_input = AudioInput(buffer=buffer)

    result = await pipeline.run(audio_input)

    # Create an audio player using `sounddevice`
    player = sd.OutputStream(samplerate=24000, channels=1, dtype=np.int16)
    player.start()

    # Play the audio stream as it comes in
    async for event in result.stream():
        if event.type == "voice_stream_event_audio":
            player.write(event.data)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

If you run this example, the agent will speak to you! Check out the example in examples/voice/static to see a demo where you can speak to the agent yourself.