[[!img Telepathy.png]]

Telepathy is a flexible, modular communications framework that enables real-time communication via pluggable protocol backends. Telepathy is a **communications service** that can be accessed by many applications ("clients") simultaneously.

This allows any application to access presence information, request a communications channel (potentially handled by another client), or collaborate contact-to-contact.

Telepathy provides protocol backends for most popular protocols including: Jabber/XMPP/Jingle, link-local XMPP, SIP, Yahoo/AIM and IRC via a unified [[D-Bus|http://dbus.freedesktop.org]] API. It also provides convenience libraries for GLib and Qt to simplify using the API from applications.

Telepathy exposes the available real-time communications capabilities of each protocol: presence, contact rosters, text chat, voice and video over IP, file transfer and [[Telepathy Tubes|Documentation/Tubes]].

 [[!img TelepathyArchitectureOverview.png]]

Telepathy is **[[modular|Rationale]]**. Each backend and client runs in a separate process, allowing for much greater security and resilience. It is suitable both for embedded and desktop environments.

# Using Telepathy

## End users

Telepathy is a *framework*, therefore it is mainly targetted to developers that want to enable real-time communication and collaboration features in their applications.

As an end user, you can make use of one of the *Clients* of Telepathy, which are listed in the Clients section of the [[Components|Components]] page.

## Developers

See [[Developing With Telepathy]].

# Developing Telepathy

See [[Contributing]].


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