companies
Hume AI
Builds voice AI that reads emotional tone in speech and responds with matching prosody, powering its Empathic Voice Interface and Octave text-to-speech models.
Hume AI was founded in 2021 by psychologist and former Google AI researcher Alan Cowen to build voice technology that understands emotional expression, not just words. The company trained its models on large datasets of vocal bursts, speech, and facial expression labeled for perceived emotion, giving its systems a way to detect tone, stress, and sentiment in a speaker's voice. Its two flagship products are the Empathic Voice Interface (EVI), a speech-to-speech model that responds to a caller's tone in real time, and Octave, a text-to-speech engine that can be directed with plain-language acting instructions like 'sound relieved but still worried.' Enterprise customers use the API to build voice agents for customer support, coaching, and companion apps. In January 2026, Google DeepMind struck a licensing deal for Hume's emotion-detection technology and hired several of its senior audio engineers, including Cowen, who joined DeepMind while remaining connected to Hume. Andrew Ettinger took over as CEO, and the company says it continues to operate independently and serve its existing enterprise customers.
- Founded
- 2021
- Headquarters
- New York, United States
- Sector
- applications
Tools
- Octave
Octave is Hume's text-to-speech API for expressive speech, custom voices, emotional delivery, and real-time audio streaming.
- Empathic Voice Interface (EVI)
EVI is Hume's real-time voice AI for building conversations that respond to vocal expression and emotional context.