Pipecat 1.13.0 lets clients send files and images to bots

Pipecat v1.13.0 was published on October 19, 2026 in the pipecat-ai/pipecat repository. The release notes say clients can now send files and images to the bot through a new RTVI send-file message, and these are incorporated into the LLM context. Pipecat's tool hub has more background.

Release facts

What changed

• File and image input. New frames (FileRawFrame, InputFileRawFrame, UserFileRawFrame) carry a file as inline base64 bytes or a URL. New LLMContext methods produce content items that are translated per adapter: Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Gemini, OpenAI Chat and OpenAI Responses.
• URL handling. Each adapter declares which URLs its provider can fetch directly. Other URLs are downloaded by a new FileResolver, which per the notes only fetches publicly routable addresses or configured CIDR ranges, refuses redirects and applies a 50 MB cap.
• Dev runner uploads. The development runner gains a session-scoped POST /sessions/{session_id}/files endpoint, enabled with the -u/--uploads-folder flag or PIPECAT_UPLOADS_FOLDER.
• Context recovery. LLMContext.remove_invalid_file_message() removes the oldest file or image message when the OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock or Gemini service determines a request was rejected, so the context does not get stuck.
• Provider settings. The notes add OpenRouter provider routing preferences, a Grok reasoning_effort field, extra Fish Audio chunking settings, and Gemini 3.8 TTS models in GeminiTTSService.
• Backend function calls. New external function-call frames and LLMService.cancel_function_calls() support LLMWithBackend and BackendLLMWorker.

Questions

Which providers can receive uploaded files? According to the release notes, file content items are translated for Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Gemini, OpenAI Chat and OpenAI Responses. Unsupported MIME types raise during conversion instead of being silently dropped.

Is there a size limit? The notes give a 50 MB cap for both the FileResolver downloads and the development runner's upload endpoint.

Is Pipecat open source? The repository page reports a BSD-2-Clause license, and the Pipecat site calls it an "Open-source framework for voice and multimodal conversational AI."

Follow the Pipecat hub, browse voice agents, or compare with the recent Pydantic AI 2.58.0 launch.