I’m starting a project that requires multiple specialized agents (e.g., a "Receptionist" handing off to a "Technical Specialist"). LiveKit seems to have a very clean "Agent Handoff" pattern, while Pipecat offers more granular pipeline control. For a team that needs to ship to production in under a month, which ecosystem has the better "out-of-the-box" support for multi-agent state preservation?
3 answers
If you need to ship in a month, go with LiveKit. Their "Agent Handoff" pattern is built directly into the SDK. You can essentially return a new agent instance from a function_tool, and the framework handles the room transition while preserving the chat_ctx (conversation history). Pipecat is incredible if you want to build a custom graph of audio processors from scratch, but LiveKit handles the "infrastructure" of the room and the participants so much better, which saves you weeks of DevOps work.
Does LiveKit Cloud support this handoff automatically, or do I need to manage multiple "Agent Servers" myself?
I found that the context.userdata dictionary in LiveKit is the best way to pass non-transcript data (like a Customer ID) during a handoff.
Exactly. Preserving the "hidden" state is just as important as the chat history to ensure the second agent doesn't ask the user for their name again.
LiveKit Cloud handles the orchestration. You just define your agents and the "Manager" will dispatch the right worker based on the handoff trigger. It’s very similar to how a traditional call center transfer works, but for AI.