Voice agent quickstart

Set up a working voice agent in under five minutes. This page walks you through installing the Agora skills to give your AI coding assistant the official quickstarts and Agora CLI workflows. You then use the CLI to log in, clone the official starter, and run it locally. You can follow the CLI steps yourself or paste the sample prompt and let your assistant handle setup for you.

If you are new to Agora, read Core concepts first to understand how RTC, Signaling, channels, UIDs, and tokens fit together.

Install Agora skills

Agora skills teaches your AI coding assistant how to work with Conversational AI projects using official starter repos and the Agora CLI, including signing in, project binding, generating environment files, and running diagnostics. Install the CLI in the next section, or ask your assistant to run the installer for you.

npx skills add AgoraIO/skills

Paste the following prompt into your assistant's chat. You can replace Python with TypeScript or Go depending on your language preference:

Set up and run the Agora Conversational AI Python starter project locally.

Your assistant installs the CLI, signs you in, scaffolds the official starter, and guides you through the remaining steps. Follow the manual CLI steps below if you prefer to run each command yourself.

Install the Agora CLI

The Agora CLI is a native Go binary available at AgoraIO-Community/cli.

curl -fsSL https://dl.agora.io/cli/install.sh | sh
agora --help

irm https://dl.agora.io/cli/install.ps1 | iex
agora --help

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\install.ps1

Sign in, scaffold, and run

Sign in with the Agora CLI, clone the starter project, and configure it for your chosen language.

1. Sign in to Agora Console.

   agora login

2. Use agora init to clone the official starter for your chosen template, bind it to your Agora project, and write the runtime-specific environment file.

agora init my-python-demo --template python
cd my-python-demo
# Set up the web client and Python backend.
bun run setup
# Start the web client and Python backend.
bun run dev

agora init my-nextjs-demo --template nextjs
cd my-nextjs-demo
pnpm install
pnpm dev

agora init my-go-demo --template go
cd my-go-demo
make setup
make dev

3. Open http://localhost:3000 and click Start conversation.

If the agent does not join or transcripts do not appear, run agora project doctor to check credential validity, feature enablement, and network reachability.

What just happened

The CLI cloned the selected starter, connected it to your Agora project, and wrote the environment configuration required to run the demo locally.

The demo runs a local browser app and server-side agent controls:

• Browser app: Captures microphone audio and plays the agent response.
• Server-side controls: Generate tokens and start or stop the agent session.

Agora provides the realtime path between the user and the agent. The user and agent join the same Agora channel, and Agora transports low-latency audio and session events between them.

The configured models handle the speech pipeline:

1. ASR converts user speech to text.
2. The LLM reasons over the conversation and generates a response.
3. TTS converts the response back to speech.

Next steps

• Manage agent sessions: Start and stop agents with the SDKs or REST API.
• Customize models: Use managed mode, or connect your own LLM and TTS providers.
• Improve conversation quality: Tune latency, audio settings, interruptions, and turn taking.
• Optimize audio setup: Set audio profiles, scenarios, and capture behavior for your target clients.
• Observe runtime behavior: Monitor events, transcripts, session history, and failures.
• Review the API reference: Check REST and SDK parameters when you move beyond the starter.
• Prepare for production: Review projects, security, regions, logging, and operational requirements.