Hume AI

Hume AI is an advanced affective computing and voice intelligence platform designed to build emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence. Founded by leading emotion scientist Alan Cowen, the platform offers the Empathic Voice Interface (EVI), Octave text-to-speech, and expression measurement models that analyze human sentiment, vocal prosody, and emotional tone across multimodal inputs.

The platform provides bidirectional speech-to-speech communication with low latency, allowing conversational voice agents to adjust tone, cadence, and expression dynamically based on caller sentiment. Developers can customize system prompts, configure tool use, integrate external large language models like Claude or Gemini, and deploy pre-built SDKs across TypeScript, Python, React, and mobile ecosystems.

Hume AI is built primarily for software developers, voice AI engineers, customer experience teams, and health-tech innovators looking to build natural, empathetic conversational experiences. Common use cases include empathetic customer support, virtual coaching, interactive storytelling, and AI companions that understand subtle human nuances.

Hume AI operates on a freemium model with structured monthly subscriptions and usage-based overage rates for developers and enterprises. The platform offers a Free plan providing 10,000 characters (~10 minutes) per month of Octave text-to-speech (TTS), 5 minutes per month of Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) speech-to-speech interactions, and 1 concurrent connection for non-commercial testing and evaluation.

Paid tiers begin with Starter at $3 per month (30,000 characters, 40 EVI minutes, and commercial rights) and Creator at $14 per month (140,000 characters, with introductory 50% discount at $7 for the first month, and unlimited voice cloning). For scaling production workloads, the Pro plan costs $70 per month (1,000,000 TTS characters, 1,200 EVI minutes, 10 concurrent streams, and $0.06/min overage), Scale costs $200 per month (3.3 million characters, 5,000 EVI minutes, 20 concurrent connections, and $0.05/min overage), and Business costs $500 per month (10 million characters, 12,500 EVI minutes, 30 concurrent connections, and $0.04/min overage).

For large-scale enterprise deployments, Hume AI provides custom Enterprise plans featuring unlimited capacity, custom overage pricing, dedicated infrastructure, SAML SSO, SOC 2 Type II compliance, custom SLAs, and hands-on engineering support. Pay-as-you-go overage rates for additional text-to-speech range from $0.12 down to $0.05 per 1,000 characters depending on subscription tier, and external LLM inference can be connected directly via BYO API keys.