xAI STT

Overview

xAI speech-to-text is available in LiveKit Agents through LiveKit Inference and the xAI plugin. With LiveKit Inference, your agent runs on LiveKit's infrastructure to minimize latency. No separate provider API key is required, and usage and rate limits are managed through LiveKit Cloud. Use the plugin instead if you want to manage your own billing and rate limits. Pricing for LiveKit Inference is available on the pricing page.

LiveKit Inference

Use LiveKit Inference to access xAI STT without a separate xAI API key.

Usage

To use xAI, use the STT class from the inference module:

from livekit.agents import AgentSession, inference

session = AgentSession(
    stt=inference.STT(
        model="xai/stt-1",
        language="en"
    ),
    # ... llm, tts, vad, turn_handling, etc.
)

import { AgentSession, inference } from '@livekit/agents';

const session = new AgentSession({
    stt: new inference.STT({
        model: "xai/stt-1",
        language: "en"
    }),
    // ... llm, tts, vad, turnHandling, etc.
});

Parameters

Model parameters

Pass the following parameters inside extra_kwargs (Python) or modelOptions (Node.js):

String descriptors

As a shortcut, you can also pass a model ID string directly to the stt argument in your AgentSession:

from livekit.agents import AgentSession

session = AgentSession(
    stt="xai/stt-1:en",
    # ... llm, tts, vad, turn_handling, etc.
)

import { AgentSession } from '@livekit/agents';

const session = new AgentSession({
    stt: "xai/stt-1:en",
    // ... llm, tts, vad, turnHandling, etc.
});

Plugin

LiveKit's plugin support for xAI lets you connect directly to xAI's STT API with your own API key.

Installation

Install the plugin from PyPI or npm:

uv add "livekit-agents[xai]~=1.5"

pnpm add @livekit/agents-plugin-xai

Authentication

The xAI plugin requires an xAI API key.

Set XAI_API_KEY in your .env file.

Usage

Use xAI STT in an AgentSession or as a standalone transcription service. For example, you can use this STT in the Voice AI quickstart.

from livekit.plugins import xai

session = AgentSession(
    stt=xai.STT(
        language="en",
    ),
    # ... llm, tts, etc.
)

import * as xai from '@livekit/agents-plugin-xai';

const session = new voice.AgentSession({
    stt: new xai.STT({
        language: "en",
    }),
    // ... llm, tts, etc.
});

Parameters

This section describes some of the available parameters. See the plugin reference links in the Additional resources section for a complete list of all available parameters.

Speaker diarization

Enable speaker diarization so the STT assigns a speaker identifier to each word or segment. When enabled, transcript events include a speaker_id, and the STT reports capabilities.diarization = True.

With diarization enabled, you can wrap the xAI STT with MultiSpeakerAdapter for primary speaker detection and transcript formatting.

Enable speaker diarization in the STT constructor:

stt = inference.STT(
    model="xai/stt-1",
    extra_kwargs={
        "diarize": True,
    },
)

stt = xai.STT(
    enable_diarization=True,
)

Additional resources

The following resources provide more information about using xAI with LiveKit Agents.

Python package

ReferenceGitHubPyPI

Node.js plugin

ReferenceGitHubNPM

xAI docs

xAI STT docs.

Voice AI quickstart

Get started with LiveKit Agents and xAI STT.

xAI and LiveKit

Guide to the xAI and LiveKit Agents integration.