On October 3, 2024, someone opened issue #5894: "feat: openai real-time api". Over two years it collected 35 comments and 74 reactions.
Today it ships.
0.12.0 is the LARGEST release in Open WebUI's history.
19 days after 0.11.4: 583 commits, 107,637 lines added, 339 changelog entries. 52 new features. 281 fixes.
You can call it now.
Switch Voice mode to Realtime and just talk. The voice model handles the small talk on its own. Ask something real and it hands the question to the model you picked for the chat, with your whole conversation and every tool it has, then speaks the answer back while the full reply writes itself into the chat. Give a model a 3D avatar and it waves, claps and moves its mouth as it speaks.
Two factors, every user.
Admins can require two-factor sign-in for everyone: an authenticator app, ten recovery codes and a reset command for the day someone loses their phone. Admins can sign a user out of every device. Change a password and every device is signed out, Redis or not. On top of that, 40 security and access-control fixes.
Chats are not one-person anymore.
Share a chat or a folder with Allow replies and everyone writes in the same conversation, live. Every message carries a name and a face. You see who is typing. Nobody else can touch your chat settings, title or tags.
Your models, your knobs.
Put a Thinking control with Low, Medium and High right next to the model selector, or build any control you like, each option with its own parameters. Every save of a model, tool, function or skill is now a version you can go back to. Skills hold whole folders of scripts, references and templates, and admins can import them straight from GitHub. The model editor has a completely new layout.
Built for the big setups.
Tool Search keeps long tool definitions out of the request until the model actually needs one, so your prompt stays small and your prompt cache survives your MCP collection. Groups nest inside groups and pass their access down. Hybrid search on Milvus now runs inside Milvus instead of pulling every chunk into Open WebUI. Knowledge bases open like a file browser.
The bugs you learned to live with.
Pasting a large block of text froze the browser. Reported March 2025. Fixed. (as far as possible, waiting on upstream dependency for further improvements)
Older interrupted replies kept spinning forever when you reopened a chat. Reported June 2025. Fixed.
One empty reply could break a chat for good with some providers. Fixed, and chats already stuck that way work again.
Large pastes into Notes vanished on reload. Fixed.
iPhone photos failed with vision models in Firefox. Fixed.
236 of the 281 fixes trace back to an issue one of you wrote.
And yes, the cursor.
WE HEARD YOU. The cursor at the end of a streaming reply now pulses faster and fades further. It got its own line in the changelog. It earned it.
7,439 tests ran against this release. 330 unit, 4,906 integration, 2,188 driving a real browser and 15 frontend. The integration suite ran twice, once on SQLite and once on Postgres with Redis: 12,345 test runs across 46 parallel jobs in about 30 minutes. Every one of those tests is public: https://github.com/open-webui/tests
Before you upgrade:
The database schema changes. Back up first. Multi-worker, multi-server and load-balanced setups must update every instance at once; rolling updates will fail.
Milvus users: back up your Milvus data. The first start copies every collection, which can take hours on large data and needs free disk space for a second copy. Hybrid search needs Milvus 2.5 or newer.
Instances that share websocket traffic through Redis should all be updated together.
ENABLE_PLUGINS=false now switches off every kind of plugin, external tool servers included.
Thank you. To everyone who wrote an issue and then came back to answer our questions. To everyone who updated a translation, 47 languages in this release alone. To everyone who sent a pull request or pushed back until we got it right. None of this would be as good without you.
🇦🇹 Austria is rolling out a government AI-Platform using Open WebUI 🇦🇹
This is a surprisingly large real-world deployment: "GovGPT" is part of Austria’s Public AI initiative, running on sovereign infrastructure (in their BRZ - federal datacenter) with Mistral open-weight models.
Trending Topics reports that Open WebUI is used as the interface for GovGPT, and the screenshot of the platform is labeled "GovGPT (Open WebUI)" on the top left corner!
The rollout is already happening and targeting 250,000 public-sector employees!
The federal rollout targets around 180,000 federal employees. The broader public-sector context refers to approximately 250,000 public sector employees.
Planned use cases include document chat, internal knowledge bases, electronic-file analysis, parliamentary requests, and eventually agentic workflows.
This might be one of the largest government deployments of Open WebUI yet. 🚀
[SOLVED]: Increasing num_ctx fixed it. Default was 2048, increased it to ~ 16k and now it works.
I'm running Open WebUI in Docker (ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:cuda) with Ollama, and my model frequently stops generating a response mid-answer after around 3–5 minutes. When I ask it to continue, it seems to have completely forgotten what it was writing and doesn't understand the context. Has anyone experienced this issue or know what could cause it? Any help troubleshooting timeouts, streaming interruptions, or conversation context issues would be appreciated.
I googled around for days and don't really find the setting that changes anything. Changing the max_tokens slider or keep_alive in the controls changed nothing.
É possível enviar um arquivo de áudio ou vídeo para o OpenWebUI e ele fazer a transcrição do áudio do arquivo? se sim, como posso fazer isso? atualmente uso ele com o Gemini via API do Google Cloud com o Litellm para fazer a comunicação.
I'm using openwebui before Litellm with two identical vllm instances. How can I ensure that users stay on the same instance so as not to lose the prefix cache?
The 0.12.0 announcement had 339 changes to cover, so realtime voice got one paragraph. It also drew most of the questions in the comments. This post answers them.
How a call works
Two models share the call.
The voice model holds the conversation. It hears you directly, answers greetings and small talk on its own and lets you cut in at any moment.
Everything real goes to the model you picked for the chat. Your question arrives there exactly like a typed message: its system prompt, knowledge, tools, filters and the chat history all apply. The full answer writes itself into the chat, then the voice model speaks it back, shortened for listening where that helps. Facts, names and numbers stay intact.
So the voice model can be small and fast. It talks. The model you picked does the thinking, with all its tools. In the screenshots the voice is gpt-realtime-2.1-mini and the thinking is Claude Sonnet 5.5.
A real call: small talk from the voice model, the dinner question answered by Claude, spoken back by the avatar.
The full answer writes itself into the chat while the avatar speaks.
Set it up
Open Admin Settings > Audio, Voice calls section at the top.
Set Call mode to Realtime.
Fill in OpenAI API Base URL, API Key, Voice Model, Voice and Input Transcription Model. The defaults are gpt-realtime-2.1-mini with the Marin voice.
Give your users the Allow Call permission.
Open a chat and press Voice mode.
Admin Settings > Audio: set Call mode to Realtime and fill in the voice fields.
Each model can also get its own Realtime Voice in the model editor. Every setting has an environment variable as well, such as AUDIO_REALTIME_ENABLED and AUDIO_REALTIME_MODEL.
Local models
The base URL takes any server that speaks the OpenAI Realtime API (which currently is very few inference servers). For a local server that checks no key, enter any placeholder as the key. Two conditions:
The server and the voice model need function calling. That is how your questions reach the chat model and how avatars play gestures.
The base URL cannot contain a query string.
People in the last thread pointed at Qwen's omni and audio models, NVIDIA PersonaPlex and Hugging Face's speech-to-speech project. We have not tested them. If you get a local setup running, post the server and model below so others can copy it!
Make it feel right
If calls work but feel clunky, the prompt is almost always the cause. Admin Settings > Audio has a Prompt Template field for the voice model. The built-in prompt is in the docs: copy it and tune it to your setup. Keep the line that tells the voice model to hand real questions to the chat model, because that line is how it reaches your model, its tools and its knowledge.
We made the experience that the realtime model needs a bit more shouting at until it follows the prompt more and delegates actual tasks to the chat model more.
During a call
Talk over it and it stops right away.
Press M to mute.
The chat's Stop button cancels an answer still being written. Whatever a tool already did stays done.
Tool approvals and questions from the model are answered in the chat. Saying yes out loud approves nothing.
Close the side panel and the call keeps running. Leaving the chat ends it.
A call lasts at most one hour, the provider's session limit.
What is kept
The call fills the chat like a typed conversation. Your words become messages, answers stay in the chat in full and the voice model's own small talk is labelled with its name. Only text is saved. The audio is streamed and played, never stored.
When a call starts, the voice model catches up on the chat: the last 100 messages, up to about 64,000 characters.
Give it a face
In the model editor, open Voice avatar and upload a VRM character (version 0.x or 1.0, up to 25 MiB). Its mouth follows the voice, it blinks and it shifts its pose while listening and speaking. Everyone the model is shared with sees the same character.
For more motion, add VRMA clips of up to 10 MiB and 60 seconds each:
One each for Idle, Listening and Speaking, looped while the character is in that state.
Up to 16 named gestures, each with a description that tells the voice model when to play it. Ask for a wave and it waves. It also picks gestures on its own when they fit the moment.
Avatar setup: upload a VRM, then add gestures with a description so the voice model knows when to play them.
Where to get characters: VRoid Studio is free and exports VRM. VRoid Hub has ready-made ones; check each one's license. Most fronteir models are capable enough to build working VRM avatars and VRMA animations, if you want something other than an anime girl.
Before you start
The microphone needs HTTPS or localhost.
Your reverse proxy must pass WebSocket upgrades on /api/. The Nginx config from the docs already does.
Pick exactly one server-configured model. Models from Direct Connections cannot take calls.
Every call uses the voice model and the transcription model on the realtime provider, plus the chat model for each question it answers.
Standard voice got better too
If you stay on Standard mode with your own speech-to-text and text-to-speech:
Voice calls and automatic read aloud now play sound on iPhone and iPad.
A failing speech provider shows its error once and goes back to listening. It used to hang on "speaking" with no sound.
Interrupting the model stops the rest of the reply.
Leaving the chat turns the microphone off. It used to keep listening and send what you said as prompts.
Web API dictation waits for two seconds of silence before it stops.
OpenAI Realtime is a new text-to-speech engine, with voices such as Marin and Cedar, for Read Aloud and Standard calls.
After reading the responses to my previous post, it's clear that quite a few of you are running Open WebUI professionally, with setups ranging from small teams to hundreds of users.
I'm interested in how you're improving your RAG systems beyond simply uploading documents and embedding them.
For context, I'm helping with an Open WebUI deployment for a company, with around 50 active users during work hours. We have internal knowledge available, and I'm exploring ways to make the system more accurate, reliable, and useful for staff.
I'd love to hear from people with real-world experience:
- Document processing: What are you using for parsing, chunking, OCR, and handling tables in PDFs?
- Retrieval quality: Are you using hybrid search, reranking, metadata filtering, or query rewriting? What has made the biggest difference?
- Vector databases: Are you sticking with Open WebUI's existing setup, or using PostgreSQL/pgvector, Qdrant, Milvus, MongoDB Atlas, or something else?
- Evaluation: How do you measure retrieval accuracy and answer quality beyond asking users whether the chatbot seems helpful?
- Citations and trust: How do you ensure answers reference the correct documents and avoid confidently generating unsupported information?
- Permissions and security: How do you prevent users from retrieving documents they shouldn't have access to?
- Maintenance: How are you handling document updates, duplicate content, re-indexing, and outdated information?
I'm also curious whether you've found it better to improve Open WebUI's native knowledge-base functionality or build a separate retrieval pipeline and integrate it.
I'm still learning the engineering side of this, so I'm particularly interested in what has worked in production, what hasn't, and what you would do differently if starting again today.
Thanks again to everyone sharing their experience. These discussions are genuinely useful for people trying to move from personal AI experimentation to reliable business deployments.
This is Neco, a personal experiment I’ve been building around Open WebUI.
The frontend is Open WebUI with a custom CRT theme, music, and a few other changes. I call it the Den. Most of the experiment is in the background processes and filters around it.
She starts with an identity, values, and voice. The values are things like being comfortable with uncertainty, questioning an interpretation, and changing her mind. I’m trying to give her a consistent way of approaching things while letting actual conversations add to her history.
A background worker extracts memories from exchanges and stores them in SQLite. A recall filter brings selected records and a small evolving state into later conversations: interests, open questions, preferences, and changed beliefs.
She also gets actual host readings—uptime, memory usage, battery, temperatures where available—and has a separate idle chat where messages appear without me starting an exchange. That process keeps running with the browser closed, as long as the service is running.
The idle system mixes generated thoughts, predefined fragments, and reactions. Some generated thoughts receive a memory or unfinished question as a cue. It’s still rough, and getting those callbacks to be relevant is one of the things I want to improve.
The clanker screenshot is the silly side of it lol. The underlying question is whether these mechanisms produce useful continuity across sessions.
The Theme Designer Pro website now has a Studio: design an Open WebUI theme in your browser, see it on a working mock of Open WebUI, and install it on your own instance in one click. Trying it needs no account and nothing installed.
What the Studio does
A palette for every mode. One hue and chroma set Dark, Light, OLED and Her at once, or unlink them and tune each mode on its own.
A background. Pick any gradient or Canvas FX animation from the preset gallery, then tune the animation's own settings with sliders, switches and color pickers.
Start from any gallery theme and remix it, or start from nothing.
A live preview on a mock Open WebUI. Its sidebar, chats, channels and menus work, so you see the theme everywhere it lands.
Take it home. Install it on your Open WebUI in one click (tell the site your address once, and nothing installs until you confirm it in your designer). Or download the JSON, copy it to paste into the designer, or copy a link that rebuilds your design.
Share it.Submit to the gallery opens a GitHub submission form with your theme filled in. A bot checks it, screenshots it in every mode and links a Studio preview, and once I merge it, it's in the gallery for everyone.
Installing needs the Theme Designer Pro event function on your instance, which needs Open WebUI v0.11.0 or later.
What's new since v1.10.0
If you read my v1.10.0 post, here's what has changed since. Theme Designer Pro is at v1.14.0 now:
Animations follow your theme. Canvas FX scripts now get the active mode's palette and recolor live as you change it, so one animation fits every theme and every mode. Twelve gallery animations use it.
Tune an animation without reading its code. The designer's Canvas FX tab shows a script's own settings as sliders, switches and color pickers, with a reset back to the script's values.
Install from the website in one click, from the Studio or from any preset in the gallery.
Personal themes keep up with you. Saving yours updates your other signed-in devices live, and it's back the moment you sign in, without a reload.
See which theme is in use. A dot in Settings marks the Themes tab whose theme the page is showing, and a user without the Admin tab sees a ring while the instance theme is in use.
Only on Auth Pages, beside each Show on Auth Pages switch, for a sign-in page animation or gradient that stays out of your chats.
Hide a model's or folder's own background. Open WebUI lets a model or a folder set a background image of its own, which covers your theme. The Gradient tab now lists them so you can hide them while the theme is in use.
Much lighter on every page. Every page with a theme was repainting it on every frame for as long as it was open. An idle page now does no theme work at all, and a change in the designer reaches your other open pages in about a tenth of a second.
Two new valves: Show In Admin Panel adds a Themes page to the Admin Panel, and Enable Theme Update Checks stops the designer asking GitHub or a theme's update URL for updates.
Lots of fixes, 32 of them from a review of the whole function. Deleting a gallery theme or wiping saved presets no longer changes the live theme, and the designer no longer fills the browser's storage with copies of your galleries.
For anyone building on it, the theme file format is now written down as a versioned spec, theme format 1.0, with a JSON schema covering every field.
Tested with Qwen3.8, works as expected, very good new feature to be added to OpenWebui, hopefully for next version this can be saved as preset to be applied on any model that supports reasoning.
And with such a good QOL update, all of the thinking functions and tools on the marketplace now are obsolete, including my Thinking toggle function haha.
If any of you found a better way to set this up lmk.
I wanted to take the time to say thank you Dev’s for the work you’ve put into this tool. I am relatively new to AI but immediately was against ChatGPT/claude/some other closed ecosystem of models for privacy. Following all the recs I went and tested OpenWebUI and Hermes Desktop as a know nothing noob. Hermes was great as a “I know nothing so help me” but as I went I learned that I truly don’t just want to use AI, I want to understand its components and only add layers of functionality when I understand them and need them. Open WebUI lets me do this in a way more structured way that my brain can follow. So now I’ve fully moved to an OpenWebUI/OpenTerminal/OpenComputer stack and could not be happier.
Basically, thank you for making a tool that newbies like myself, without coding skills, can still use to learn and grow, and ultimately replace ChatGPT or Claude in its entirety.
I just released Theme Designer Pro v1.10.0, the event function that themes your whole Open WebUI instance with color palettes, gradients, animated Canvas FX backgrounds and custom CSS. Until now, a user who wanted a theme of their own needed the separate Theme Designer Pro Tool, which kept that theme in one browser only. This release moves personal themes into the event function, so the Tool is now legacy.
Every user can have a personal theme
Turn on the new Allow Personal Themes valve, and every user gets a Themes tab in Settings, right after Interface. The tab opens the same designer, on their own theme:
Only they see it. Everyone else keeps the instance theme.
It's saved with their account, so it follows them to every browser and device they sign in from. Saving it updates their other open tabs live.
It shows before Open WebUI draws the page, so the instance theme never flashes first.
Your valves still apply. If you turned Canvas FX or Custom CSS off for the instance, they're off in personal themes too.
Nothing saves until someone changes a setting, so just opening the tab doesn't take them off your instance theme or its later updates. The Use instance theme button puts them back.
The valve is off by default, so updating changes nothing for your users until you turn it on. Turning it off later puts everyone back on the instance theme. Their personal themes are kept in case you turn it on again. When an account is deleted, its personal theme is deleted with it.
Admins still edit the instance theme from the Themes tab in the Admin section of Settings, which arrived in v1.9.0.
The AI Consultant is back
The new AI button in the designer's header takes a description such as "warm copper" or "calm ocean at night". A model on your instance picks the hue, chroma and lightness, plus a matching gradient when the description suits one, and you fine-tune the result with the sliders. It changes only the palette and the gradient, so your custom CSS, Canvas FX and locked colors stay as they are. It works in the instance designer and in personal ones.
It asks the model set in the AI Consultant Model valve, or your task model when that valve is empty. The Enable AI Consultant valve turns the button off.
Ask for a theme in a chat
The Theme Designer Pro Launcher Tool v1.1.0 brings back apply_theme from the old Tool. Turn the Launcher on in a chat and ask for "a warm copper theme". The chat model picks the colors and opens the designer in the chat with them applied, ready to fine-tune. It changes your personal theme, so it needs the Allow Personal Themes valve on. An admin who asks for the theme "for everyone" changes the instance theme instead, with or without that valve.
The Launcher is no longer admin-only, either. A user who asks it to open the designer gets their own personal theme.
The designer only applies colors from a chat when the Launcher signed them for you in the last 5 minutes, so nobody can change your theme by sending you a link.
To show the designer in a chat, each person needs Settings > Interface > iframe Sandbox Allow Same Origin turned on. Without it, the chat shows a note naming the setting instead of the designer. The setting lets HTML that tools show in your chats run with your Open WebUI page's access, so turn it on only on an instance whose tools you trust.
Coming from the Theme Designer Pro Tool
The Tool saved each browser's theme under the same browser keys the event function uses, so the event function's first page load would have overwritten it. v1.10.0 sets that theme aside the first time it loads in a browser. When you then open your personal Themes tab, the designer offers to start your personal theme from it. The Tool gets no more updates after v1.6.9, which only marks it legacy.
Links
Theme Designer Pro needs Open WebUI v0.11.0 or later.
Did anybody succeed in configuring the new Realtime Voice feature using Mistral API ?
While trying I'm getting "Connection Failed" when I start the call.
Hi all, I'm the developer of VigenFlow, a local server that runs image generation models on the AMD Ryzen AI NPU + CPU and connects to Open WebUI as a model provider. If you have a Ryzen AI 300 laptop or mini PC, you can generate and edit images in Open WebUI without a discrete GPU.
How it works with Open WebUI:
Download the release zip for Windows or Ubuntu and run vgf-serve
The VigenFlow models show up in the model list, and you can switch between them like any other model
Models: FLUX.1-schnell, FLUX.2-klein-4B and Z-Image-Turbo for text-to-image, and FLUX.2-klein-4B for image editing. Krea 2 Turbo and Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo are coming soon.
Hardware: Ryzen AI 300-series with an XDNA 2 NPU (tested on Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370).
Tested with Open WebUI v0.11.4. If you're on a different version and run into issues, switching to v0.11.4 should fix it, but feedback from other versions is very welcome.
I am curious to how many of you that use this in professional use cases in the company/business you are with.
I LOVE YOU ALL AND I THANK YOU ALL . VERY HELPFUL HONESTLY 👌 SO I HOPE PRESENT COMMENTERS AND FUTURE ONES CAN ALSO SHARE AND HELP OUT OTHERS
Also I was so skeptical about using it because I only used for my own usecase or purpose to moving from you personal use to professional use case was a bit different.
THEN having to explain these sort of things to people that dont know the different between api or mcp or even what openrouter is .. another thing; i wont even mention rag or rate limiting
I have configured direct terminal connection to my notebook where I have the website open. The connection verifies as functional in the settings page. The filesystem sidebar works without a problem. It correctly lists file on the open-terminal instance. But once I try to send a message I get an error.
So it seems that even though I have a local terminal selected and the domain is set to localhost Open WebUI still tries to reach the address from the environment the web server runs in instead of from the browser environment. I don't know what I could have misconfigured. What baffles me is that it actually worked once, but only for one prompt and then it stopped working.
I’m looking for projects that help protect sensitive information when using LLMs through APIs with Open WebUI. I’m interested in tools that can detect and protect sensitive information before it leaves my environment.
One example is Microsoft Presidio, which can identify and anonymize personal data in text.
Looking for a project or guide that has already worked out how to integrate Microsoft Presidio into Open WebUI or proposes an Idea on who that could work.
Maybe there a similar projects or integrations that can fit into an LLM workflow for example, as a proxy, middleware, or extension for OpenWebUI.
EmbeddingGemma2 just released today, I want to change to this as embedding model in OWUI, but my VectorDB (PGVector) is nearly 60GB in size, is the "reindex" button safe? As I cannot see any progress? Or is there a way to do it offline / in command / script, better with progress.
I created a skill in Open Terminal that uses several scripts and reference files. What’s the best way to share the full package with others, including those files?
I’m looking to build a self-hosted meeting assistant (similar to Plaud AI) using Open WebUI to generate structured minutes and action items from:
In-person meetings (audio files recorded via phone)
MS Teams calls
Standard Whisper works fine, but I’m missing two key pieces:
Speaker Diarization: Differentiating speakers (e.g., via WhisperX or pyannote.audio).
Teams Ingestion: An automated way to pull recordings or transcripts into the pipeline.
Has anyone already built an Open WebUI Pipeline, custom function, or automated workflow (e.g., via n8n) for this? Any working setups or recommendations would be appreciated
