Voxbento

Voxbento is a real-time interpretation platform for live events. It provides a browser-first, zero-install experience for simultaneous interpreters, allowing them to monitor the main floor video via Jitsi and broadcast translated audio to attendees with low latency.

Official Documentation: docs.voxbento.com

Interpreters stream live audio via WebRTC/WHIP → MediaMTX → WHEP (WebRTC playback). Booth coordination (who is active, relay handoff, chat) runs over WebSocket.

Rooms can optionally add a listener-side audio synchronization delay for WHEP playback. The default is 0 ms, which keeps the existing low-latency HTML audio path unchanged. Organizers can set values such as 1000, 2000, 5000, or 8000 ms when a room's livestream video, captions, embedded player, or other external media is delayed and translated audio needs to line up with it. The delay is applied in the listener browser only; MediaMTX, WHIP, WHEP, and RTP packets are not changed.

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How it works

Interpreter browser
  │  iframe → Jitsi Meet (Monitor conference floor video/audio)
  │  mic → RTCPeerConnection → WHIP POST
  ▼
MediaMTX :8889 (WHIP ingest + WHEP)   Python is never in the audio path
  │  WebRTC termination + remux
  └──► WHEP :8889 ←── attendees connect via WebRTC (sub-second latency)

Interpreter / Coordinator browser
  │  WebSocket /ws/booth/{booth_id}
  ▼
FastAPI portal :8000 (coordination, state, JWT, REST)
  │
  ├──► Background Transcription (ffmpeg → Deepgram/OpenAI/Local)
  └──► Background Translation (Groq/Anthropic/Gemini)

Floor Audio Bot (floor-bot)
  │  Headless Chromium → Joins Jitsi Meeting
  └──► ffmpeg → RTSP → MediaMTX → Transcription/Translation

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Setup

Prerequisites

Dependency	Version	Purpose
Python	3.13+	FastAPI portal
uv	latest	Python package manager
MediaMTX	1.x	WebRTC/HLS audio server
Docker & Docker Compose	latest	Jitsi stack (or full Docker setup)

Option 1 — Docker Compose (everything in containers)

All services (portal, MediaMTX, Jitsi) start with one command:

git clone https://github.com/fossasia/voxbento.git
cd voxbento

# Configure environment
cp .env.example .env

# Required: set your admin password
echo 'ADMIN_PASSWORD=my-secure-admin-pass' >> .env

# Required for API key encryption: set your encryption key (must be 32 characters or longer)
echo 'API_KEY_ENCRYPTION_KEY=my-secure-32-char-encryption-key-for-api' >> .env

# Required for Jitsi video: set your machine's LAN IP
# macOS:  ipconfig getifaddr en0
# Linux:  hostname -I | awk '{print $1}'
echo 'DOCKER_HOST_ADDRESS=192.168.1.x' >> .env

docker compose up --build

Open http://localhost:8000 — all services are running.

For detailed API documentation, environment variables, and configuration, visit docs.voxbento.com. Native development setup details can also be found in CONTRIBUTING.md.

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Upgrade Notes

API Key Encryption & Rotation

A mandatory environment variable API_KEY_ENCRYPTION_KEY securely encrypts third-party API keys in the database.

• You must generate a secure key (e.g., using openssl rand -hex 32) and add it to your .env file before starting the application.
• Rotation: To rotate keys without breaking existing database entries, provide a comma-separated list of keys. Voxbento will encrypt new tokens using the first key, but will use all keys to attempt decryption.

Optional NVIDIA Transcription

NVIDIA Riva support is now an optional dependency to reduce the default installation footprint. If you intend to run NVIDIA transcription models, you must explicitly install the optional package:

uv pip install -e .[nvidia]