Deepgram said on Thursday that it is buying Daily, TechCrunch reported. Daily makes and maintains Pipecat, an open source framework for voice AI agents. Pipecat manages the audio and video streams and the parts that turn speech into text, write a reply and speak it, while cutting delay. Deepgram also released a new open protocol, the Real-Time Context Standard, worked out jointly with the Pipecat team. It carries details about the audio, such as a whisper, plus notes on how a language model should use them and how the reply should sound.
The companies did not disclose the price, and TechCrunch gave no closing date. Daily co-founder Kwindla Kramer said Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson committed to keeping Pipecat open source and vendor-neutral forever. Stephenson said he wants developers to use the best models for their use case, including partners' models. TechCrunch did not report what licence or governance backs the promise. Daily has raised over $62 million, according to PitchBook data.
Pipecat sits between the models, so whoever runs it shapes which ones plug in easily. That is where the leverage lies. Buyers should ask what licence or governance backs "open forever", what it costs to switch away, and which parts of the stack are Deepgram's own.