FREESTREAM 🚀

Free-tier avatar-meeting agent — joins calls, speaks with an on-device voice, wears an animated avatar, and roleplays as an agent that can work a real terminal. CLI-compatible drop-in for Pika's pikastream-video-meeting ($0.20–0.28/min hosted) at $0/min marginal cost.

Try the cognition layer in-browser: freestream-demo Space — talk to Captain Vera Steel (safe mode).

A universal, free-tier avatar-meeting skill. Clean-room reimplementation, CLI-compatible with Pika-Labs/Pika-Skills — pikastream-video-meeting (Apache-2.0). Same CLI surface, same exit codes, same output JSON — any agent trained on the Pika skill works unchanged. The metered hosted pipeline is replaced by swappable local drivers.

Measured results (8 vCPU, CPU-only — docs/LATENCY.md)

Metric	Result
Win condition (assistant profile)	t_perceived 2.94s ≤ 4.0s — PASS
Agentic roleplay e2e	17/17 — ROLEPLAY E2E OK
ASR finalize (whisper tiny.en int8, 1 thread)	1.33s
First-audio TTS path (cached disclosure)	~0.2s
Full turn (14.9s of speech)	18.9s, pipelined
Session replay	both hash chains verify

This is v0.1.0 — MVP slice working and measured: the LiveKit presence driver, faster-whisper ASR (utterance VAD → transcribe), Piper TTS with sentence-level streaming, and the audio-reactive procedural avatar all run end to end. The win condition — agent joins, answers within 4s with a moving mouth, leaves, and produces a valid replay log — passes: t_perceived = 2.94s on 8 vCPU, CPU-only, both turns answered via speculative dispatch (measured 2026-10-04, job 6ac2e756404719ba37651973, see docs/LATENCY.md). Remaining stubs: the browser join-pack (Meet/Zoom), the SIP driver, and local portrait-model rungs.

The three-layer split

Layer	Job	Drivers (preference order)
Presence	Get a participant into the call, own an A/V track	`livekit` (free, low jitter) → `browser` (Playwright + virtual cam) → `sip` (audio-only)
Persona	A face and a voice	Fidelity ladder: FULL_PORTRAIT → VISEME_STILL → AUDIO_REACTIVE_WAVE → STATIC_CARD; Piper TTS, local-only clones
Cognition	The agent, unchanged	MCP: `session.observe` / `speak` / `listen` / `leave`

Quick start

pip install -r requirements.txt

# What can this host deliver?
python scripts/freestream.py probe

# Join (MVP slice targets Jitsi / LiveKit first)
python scripts/freestream.py join --meet-url <url> --bot-name <name> \
  --image identity/videomeeting-avatar.png

# Drive the session as an agent
python -m freestream.mcp_server

CLI surface (Pika-compatible)

freestream join  --meet-url <url> --bot-name <name> --image <path>
                 [--voice-id <id>] [--system-prompt-file <path>]
                 [--system-prompt <text>] [--meeting-password <pw>]
                 [--platform jitsi|livekit|google_meet|zoom] [--timeout-sec 90]
freestream leave --session-id <id>
freestream generate-avatar --output <path> [--prompt <text>]
freestream clone-voice --audio <file> --name <name> [--noise-reduction]
freestream probe                              # FREESTREAM addition: capability negotiation

Exit codes — preserved from Pika, one repurposed:

0 ok · 1 configuration (FREESTREAM addition) · 2 validation · 3 transport · 4 session · 5 timeout
6 capability shortfall (was Pika's funding). Stdout JSON carries capability + remediation instead of checkout_url.

join emits {"session_id", "platform", "status": "created"} immediately, then status-change lines, exactly like the Pika CLI — agents that parse that stream keep working.

Latency trade-off

~~2.5–4.5s perceived turn on CPU vs. Pika's ~1.5s hosted (~~1.2–2.0s with GPU). Mitigated by 600ms speculative dispatch, sentence-level pre-roll, and avatar motion starting ~150ms before audio. See docs/LATENCY.md.

Privacy

Face and voice clones never leave the device. Hosted clones (Pika/MiniMax) expire after 7 days of non-use; FREESTREAM clones are local files. Consent and disclosure defaults: docs/CONSENT.md.

Attribution & license

Apache-2.0. Clean-room reimplementation of the CLI contract of pikastream-video-meeting by Pika Labs — no source code ported; the interface (CLI flags, exit codes, output JSON, SKILL.md agent flow, life/ identity-file conventions) is preserved for agent compatibility. The hosted PikaStreaming service is replaced, not reimplemented.