livekit-plugins-voho

Saudi Arabic voice for LiveKit Agents. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech that sound like the Kingdom answers the phone: Najdi for Riyadh, Hijazi for Jeddah and Makkah, plus Omani, Gulf, Egyptian and Modern Standard Arabic. It also handles English mixed into the same sentence, because that is how Saudi callers actually talk.

pip install livekit-plugins-voho

from livekit.agents import AgentSession
from livekit.plugins import voho

session = AgentSession(
    stt=voho.STT(language="ar-SA"),   # Saudi Arabic, with English mixed in
    tts=voho.TTS(voice="layla"),      # a Najdi voice from Riyadh
    llm=...,                          # any LiveKit LLM plugin
    vad=...,                          # e.g. silero
)

Get a key at app.voho.ai, then export VOHO_API_KEY=voho_sk_live_....

---

Why a Saudi-specific plugin

Most "Arabic" voices are Modern Standard Arabic: the register of the news, not of a phone call. A Riyadh caller hears it as a recording. A Jeddah caller hears a Najdi agent as out of town, the way a London voice sounds in Glasgow. The dialect is not a detail. It is whether the caller stays on the line.

Voho is built around that:

• Saudi dialects as separate voices. Pick Najdi or Hijazi by name, and switch mid-call when a Jeddah caller rings a Riyadh line.
• Arabic and English in one sentence. "أبغى أغيّر الـ delivery address" is transcribed as said, rather than turned into nonsense at the switch.
• Streaming both ways. Text is spoken while the LLM is still writing the sentence, and transcripts arrive while the caller is still talking, so LiveKit's turn-taking and barge-in work as designed.
• Telephone-ready. Put a LiveKit SIP trunk in front of it and it answers a Saudi 9200, 800 or geographic number.
• Saudi hosting for enterprise. The same plugin points at an in-Kingdom or on-premise Voho deployment with one base_url change.

Voices

The dialect is the voice.

Voice	Dialect	Where it sounds local	Good for
layla	Najdi, female	Riyadh, Qassim, the centre	Reception, appointments (default)
nouf	Najdi, female	Riyadh	Collections, compliance, escalations
faisal	Najdi, male	Riyadh	Banking, government, long policy text
omar	Najdi, male	Riyadh	Outbound confirmations, offers
salma	Hijazi, female	Jeddah, Makkah, Madinah	Everyday customer service
rawan	Hijazi, female	Jeddah	Retail, delivery
hisham	Hijazi, male	Jeddah	Banking, insurance
tariq	Hijazi, male	Jeddah	Bookings, follow-ups
maryam	Omani, female	Muscat, the interior	Energy, logistics, marine
salim	Omani, male	Muscat	Fleet, retail
reem	Gulf, female	UAE	Light, conversational
maha	Egyptian, female	Egypt	Reassuring, unhurried
khalid, yousef	Modern Standard	Region-neutral	Announcements, IVR
clementine, astra, marlow, vespera	English		Expat and international lines

tts.update_options(voice="salma")      # a Jeddah caller on a Riyadh line
stt.update_options(language="en-US")   # an English-only stretch

The voice sets the sound. The words set the dialect. Tell your LLM which dialect to write in, or a Najdi voice will be reading Fusha. A Najdi agent says الحين, وش, زين and أبشر; a Hijazi one says دحين, إيش, إيوه and never says أبشر. examples/agent.py has a Najdi instruction that works.

A Saudi customer-service agent in one file

examples/agent.py is a complete agent for a Riyadh retailer: it speaks Najdi, follows the caller into English and back, stops when interrupted, and looks up an order with a tool mid-call.

pip install "livekit-agents[openai,silero]" livekit-plugins-voho
export VOHO_API_KEY=... OPENAI_API_KEY=...
python examples/agent.py console

To answer a phone number, create a LiveKit SIP inbound trunk and dispatch rule. The LiveKit guide walks through it.

What the plugin calls

Method	Voho API
TTS.synthesize()	POST /v1/speech/stream	Whole sentence in, chunked PCM out
TTS.stream()	WS /v1/speech/ws	Tokens in as the LLM writes, audio out as it is produced
STT.recognize()	POST /v1/transcribe	One utterance
STT.stream()	WS /v1/transcribe/ws	Interim and final transcripts while the caller speaks

Audio is 16-bit mono PCM: 24 kHz from the TTS, 16 kHz into the STT. LiveKit resamples for the room.

Pricing

Text-to-speech (sada-1, streaming)	5¢ per 1,000 characters
Text-to-speech (nabra-1)	2¢ per 1,000 characters
Speech-to-text	3¢ per started minute

Prepaid, per key. GET /v1/usage returns what a key used this month, in the units it was billed in.

Data and hosting

• Audio is not stored. Billing keeps character and minute counts, nothing else.
• The public API runs in London.
• In-Kingdom and on-premise deployments are available for enterprise contracts, with the same API and plugin. See docs.voho.ai/on-prem/residency.

Errors

Voho error codes appear in the exception message (unauthorized, insufficient_credit, unknown_voice, text_too_long), so the log says what to fix. Client errors are not retried. Server errors and rate limits are, using LiveKit's APIConnectOptions.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest                               # against a local mock of the API, no key needed
VOHO_API_KEY=... pytest -m live      # real synthesis, and a speak-then-transcribe round trip in Arabic

Links

• LiveKit guide: docs.voho.ai/livekit
• API reference: docs.voho.ai
• Hear the voices: voho.ai/demos
• Contact: support@voho.ai

Apache-2.0