@kwindla: Pipecat v1.8.0 today, with launch day support for Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, Google's new Gemini-based transcription model.…

Pipecat v1.8.0 today, with launch day support for Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, Google's new Gemini-based transcription model. This is a very big Pipecat release. There are 233 entries in the changelog. Some highlights: Improvements to error handling and service failover: Processors can now report when they are no longer usable, errors are categorized, and ServiceSwitcher only fails over when a service really can't recover. STT/TTS services also stop endlessly retrying permanent failures like invalid API keys or models. Faster pipeline startup: Pipeline setup has been reworked around the new setup() lifecycle, allowing processors and services to initialize and connect concurrently before the pipeline starts. Combined with import-time improvements, this significantly reduces startup time, especially for larger pipelines. More flexible turn management: Services with built-in turn detection now propose turn boundaries, while Pipecat's turn strategies make the final decision. This keeps turn management and interruption handling in one place and makes provider-native turn detection much easier to customize. Pipecat Evals keeps getting more powerful: Run scenarios during development to iteratively measure pass rates, get machine-readable results.jsonl, evaluate turns individually, run entire directories of scenarios, and more. Great for measuring nondeterministic behaviors like interruptions and async function calls instead of testing them once and hoping for the best. Better coding-agent experience: Pipecat Context Hub is now included with the CLI and integrated into pipecat init, including automatic setup for supported coding agents and freshness checks to help prevent agents from generating code against stale Pipecat APIs. Function calls can now be cancelled by the LLM: Long-running async tools can opt into LLM-driven cancellation, and timed-out function calls are now automatically cancelled instead of continuing to run in the background. New Speechify TTS, ElevenLabs Dialogue TTS, Bland TTS, Sarvam Realtime STT, Deepgram Flux on SageMaker, OpenClaw Gateway support, LiveKit runner support, MoQ client mode for connecting bots through a relay, including deployments behind NAT and more. And, of course, there are tons of fixes and smaller improvements throughout the framework, including pipeline startup/cleanup, metrics, TTS tracking, transports, realtime services, and turn handling. Huge thanks to everyone in the community for making everything we do possible! There are now more than 180 Pipecat integrations. Happy hacking!