Pipecat (gateway)

Route Pipecat’s underlying LLM calls through the Respan gateway to use 250+ models from different providers. Only your RESPAN_API_KEY is needed — no separate provider keys required.

Setup

Install packages

$ pip install "pipecat-ai[openai]"

Set environment variables

$ export RESPAN_API_KEY="YOUR_RESPAN_API_KEY"
$ export RESPAN_BASE_URL="https://api.respan.ai/api"
$ export RESPAN_MODEL="gpt-5.5"

No OPENAI_API_KEY needed — the Respan gateway handles provider authentication.

Point Pipecat to the Respan gateway

1 import os
2 
3 from pipecat.services.openai.llm import OpenAILLMService
4 
5 llm = OpenAILLMService(
6     api_key=os.environ["RESPAN_API_KEY"],
7     base_url=os.getenv("RESPAN_BASE_URL", "https://api.respan.ai/api"),
8     settings=OpenAILLMService.Settings(model=os.getenv("RESPAN_MODEL", "gpt-5.5")),
9 )

Then build and run your pipeline as usual.

Switch models

Change the model setting on OpenAILLMService to use another OpenAI model through the same gateway-backed endpoint.

1 OpenAILLMService(
2     api_key=os.environ["RESPAN_API_KEY"],
3     base_url="https://api.respan.ai/api",
4     settings=OpenAILLMService.Settings(model="gpt-5.5"),
5 )
6 
7 OpenAILLMService(
8     api_key=os.environ["RESPAN_API_KEY"],
9     base_url="https://api.respan.ai/api",
10     settings=OpenAILLMService.Settings(model="gpt-5-mini"),
11 )

OpenAILLMService is Pipecat’s OpenAI-compatible service. This page avoids showing Claude or Gemini inside that OpenAI-named service; use the Respan API or OpenAI SDK gateway pages for provider-neutral Claude and Gemini examples.

See the full model list.