Welcome to the GitHub repositories of the Open Voice Interoperability Initiative! The Open Voice Interoperability Initiative is a project of the Linux Foundation AI and Data Foundation. It aims to revolutionize the conversational AI landscape by enabling voice and conversational AI systems to function like the web. Currently, conversational assistants operate in isolated walled gardens, confining users to a single proprietary ecosystem. The initiative proposes a future where users can seamlessly interact with any assistant or language model, just as they do now when navigating web pages.

Our approach involves defining, developing, and promoting standards, starting with an open, universal application messaging protocol or programming interface (API) called the Open Floor Protocol (OFP). The Open Floor Protocol consists of three specifications, the Conversation Envelope, Dialog Events, and the Assistant Manifest. This API allows assistants to interoperate across platforms, facilitating seamless communication and content transfer.

Our GitHub repositories are where you can find our specifications, documentation, language libraries, sample floor managers, and sample implementations.

Interoperability is crucial for user access, opportunity, and commercial freedom in the evolving conversational AI domain. Unlike the World Wide Web, where browsers allow users to freely access billions of web pages based on standardized protocols, conversational assistants currently operate in closed ecosystems. Interoperability among conversational assistants is inspired by the web's open ecosystem, allowing users to switch between assistants effortlessly and access diverse sources of information.

Standard message formats, such as the Conversation Envelope, Dialog Events, and the Assistant Manifest, are being developed for conveying information between assistants that enables them to collaborate on addressing users' goals. The openfloor-docs repository contains these specifications and always carries the current published version of the Open Floor Protocol.

We advocate for developing interoperability protocols through an open, transparent, and participatory process. This involves collecting and analyzing case studies, publishing requirements and specifications for review, sharing work through webinars and demonstrations, maintaining a repository of documents and code, and encouraging developer involvement.

Open Voice Interoperability plans to address issues like the discovery and location of conversational agents and to address important security and privacy concerns. The roadmap also includes investigating how a universal API can simplify development and ensure consistency across services.

The initiative invites participation from developers, researchers, and organizations interested in shaping the future of conversational AI. Explore our reference floor manager and sample agents, comment on the specifications, and most importantly, try out the specifications with your conversational assistants.

• openfloor.dev — an independent, developer-focused guide to building with the Open Floor Protocol: tutorials, walkthroughs, and quick-start material.

Our work spans a few repositories. If you're new, read the specifications first, then pick the library for your language, then look at the floor and the examples to see how agents are wired together.

• openfloor-docs — the normative Open Floor Protocol specifications: the Conversation Envelope, Dialog Events, and the Assistant Manifest, with schemas and worked examples. Start here. This is the source of truth for what a compliant message looks like.
• background — supplementary material on the initiative: motivation, history, and supporting write-ups.

• openfloor-python — the reference Python implementation of OFP. Envelope / event / manifest types, payload validation, and a BotAgent base class you subclass to build a compliant assistant. Most of the examples here are built on this.

• openfloor-js — a strict, standards-compliant TypeScript library for OFP, for building agents and clients in JavaScript / TypeScript.

  The floor, and worked examples

• floor-implementations — implementations of the Floor Manager: the component that owns conversation and floor state for a multi-agent conversation and routes every event between participants (Pass-Through to all conversants, Delegate-to-Convener for coordination). Includes web-floor, a Flask gateway plus browser UI that acts as a spec-compliant floor manager you can run locally and point agents at.

• implementation-examples — runnable OFP agents and multi-agent teams. Single agents (e.g. a NASA space assistant, a world-time agent, a fact-checker, a deliberate hallucination demo), an agent-template with full event handling, and full teams — a cafeteria-operations team and a startup-analysis team, each a convener plus domain specialists that run on a floor from floor-implementations. Every agent is standalone and can be reused in other conversations.

openfloor-docs defines the messages. openfloor-python / openfloor-js let you build participants that speak them. floor-implementations provides the floor that connects participants and moves the conversation along. implementation-examples contains current open-source OFP agents that you can test in your own environment.

flowchart TB
    Docs["<b>openfloor-docs</b><br/>The Open Floor Protocol specifications<br/>Conversation Envelope · Dialog Events · Assistant Manifest"]

    subgraph Libs ["Libraries for building participants"]
        Py["<b>openfloor-python</b><br/>Python"]
        Js["<b>openfloor-js</b><br/>TypeScript"]
    end

    Examples["<b>implementation-examples</b><br/>Sample OFP agents and multi-agent teams<br/>cafeteria-ops · startup-strategy · agent-template · single agents"]

    Floor["<b>floor-implementations</b><br/>Floor Manager — owns conversation and floor state<br/>and routes every event between participants<br/>(includes the web-floor gateway and browser UI)"]

    User(["User / client app"])

    Docs -->|"defines the message formats"| Libs
    Libs -->|"used to build compliant agents"| Examples
    Examples <-->|"OFP conversation envelopes"| Floor
    User <-->|"one conversation, many agents"| Floor

For more information, see:

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