New York-based AI startup Hume has unveiled its newest Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) conversational AI mannequin, EVI 3 (pronounced “Evee” Three, just like the Pokémon character), concentrating on every part from powering buyer assist techniques and well being teaching to immersive storytelling and digital companionship.
EVI 3 lets customers create their very own voices by speaking to the mannequin (it’s voice-to-voice/speech-to-speech), and goals to set a brand new normal for naturalness, expressiveness, and “empathy” based on Hume — that’s, how customers understand the mannequin’s understanding of their feelings and its capacity to reflect or regulate its personal responses, when it comes to tone and phrase alternative.
Designed for companies, builders, and creators, EVI 3 expands on Hume’s earlier voice fashions by providing extra refined customization, quicker responses, and enhanced emotional understanding.
Particular person customers can work together with it right this moment by Hume’s stay demo on its web site and iOS app, however developer entry by Hume’s proprietary software programming interface (API) is alleged to be made accessible in “the coming weeks,” as a weblog put up from the corporate states.
At that time, builders will have the ability to embed EVI 3 into their very own customer support techniques, inventive tasks, or digital assistants — for a value (see beneath).
My very own utilization of the demo allowed me to create a brand new, customized artificial voice in seconds primarily based on qualities I described to it — a mixture of heat and assured, and a masculine tone. Chatting with it felt extra naturalistic and simple than different AI fashions and positively the inventory voices from legacy tech leaders such Apple with Siri and Amazon with Alexa.
What builders and companies ought to learn about EVI 3
Hume’s EVI 3 is constructed for a variety of makes use of—from customer support and in-app interactions to content material creation in audiobooks and gaming.
It permits customers to specify exact character traits, vocal qualities, emotional tone, and dialog matters.
This implies it might probably produce something from a heat, empathetic information to a unusual, mischievous narrator—all the way down to requests like “a squeaky mouse whispering urgently in a French accent about its scheme to steal cheese from the kitchen.”
EVI 3’s core energy lies in its capacity to combine emotional intelligence straight into voice-based experiences.
Not like conventional chatbots or voice assistants that rely closely on scripted or text-based interactions, EVI 3 adapts to how folks naturally converse — selecting up on pitch, prosody, pauses, and vocal bursts to create extra partaking, humanlike conversations.
Nonetheless, one massive function Hume’s fashions at present lack — and which is obtainable by rivals open supply and proprietary, reminiscent of ElevenLabs — is voice cloning, or the fast replication of a consumer’s or different voice, reminiscent of an organization CEO.
But Hume has indicated it can add such a functionality to its Octave text-to-speech mannequin, as it’s famous as “coming soon” on Hume’s web site, and prior reporting by yours really on the corporate discovered it can permit customers to duplicate voices from as little as 5 seconds of audio.
Hume has acknowledged it’s prioritizing safeguards and moral issues earlier than making this function broadly accessible. At present, this cloning functionality just isn’t accessible in EVI itself, with Hume emphasizing versatile voice customization as an alternative.
Inside benchmarks present customers choose EVI 3 to OpenAI’s GPT-4o voice mannequin
In keeping with Hume’s personal assessments with 1,720 customers, EVI 3 was most well-liked over OpenAI’s GPT-4o in each class evaluated: naturalness, expressiveness, empathy, interruption dealing with, response pace, audio high quality, voice emotion/type modulation on request, and emotion understanding on request (the “on request” options are lined in “instruction following” seen beneath).
It additionally normally bested Google’s Gemini mannequin household and the brand new open supply AI mannequin agency Sesame from former Oculus co-creator Brendan Iribe.
It additionally boasts decrease latency (~300 milliseconds), sturdy multilingual assist (English and Spanish, with extra languages coming), and successfully limitless customized voices. As Hume writes on its web site (see screenshot instantly beneath):
Key capabilities embody:
Prosody era and expressive text-to-speech with modulation.
Interruptibility, enabling dynamic conversational movement.
In-conversation voice customizability, so customers can regulate talking type in actual time.
API-ready structure (coming quickly), so builders can combine EVI 3 straight into apps and providers.
Pricing and developer entry
Hume affords versatile, usage-based pricing throughout its EVI, Octave TTS, and Expression Measurement APIs.
Whereas EVI 3’s particular API pricing has not been introduced but (marked as TBA), the sample suggests it is going to be usage-based, with enterprise reductions accessible for big deployments.
For reference, EVI 2 is priced at $0.072 per minute — 30% decrease than its predecessor, EVI 1 ($0.102/minute).
For creators and builders working with text-to-speech tasks, Hume’s Octave TTS plans vary from a free tier (10,000 characters of speech, ~10 minutes of audio) to enterprise-level plans. Right here’s the breakdown:
Free: 10,000 characters, limitless customized voices, $0/month
Starter: 30,000 characters (~half-hour), 20 tasks, $3/month
Creator: 100,000 characters (~100 minutes), 1,000 tasks, usage-based overage ($0.20/1,000 characters), $10/month
Professional: 500,000 characters (~500 minutes), 3,000 tasks, $0.15/1,000 additional, $50/month
Scale: 2,000,000 characters (~2,000 minutes), 10,000 tasks, $0.13/1,000 additional, $150/month
Enterprise: 10,000,000 characters (~10,000 minutes), 20,000 tasks, $0.10/1,000 additional, $900/month
Enterprise: Customized pricing and limitless utilization
For builders engaged on real-time voice interactions or emotional evaluation, Hume additionally affords a Pay as You Go plan with $20 in free credit and no upfront dedication. Excessive-volume enterprise prospects can go for a devoted Enterprise plan that includes dataset licenses, on-premises options, customized integrations, and superior assist.
Hume’s historical past of emotive AI voice fashions
Based in 2021 by Alan Cowen, a former researcher at Google DeepMind, Hume goals to bridge the hole between human emotional nuance and AI interplay.
The corporate skilled its fashions on an expansive dataset drawn from lots of of hundreds of contributors worldwide—capturing not simply speech and textual content, but additionally vocal bursts and facial expressions.
“Emotional intelligence includes the ability to infer intentions and preferences from behavior. That’s the very core of what AI interfaces are trying to achieve,” Cowen informed VentureBeat. Hume’s mission is to make AI interfaces extra responsive, humanlike, and finally extra helpful—whether or not that’s serving to a buyer navigate an app or narrating a narrative with simply the suitable mix of drama and humor.
In early 2024, the corporate launched EVI 2, which supplied 40% decrease latency and 30% diminished pricing in comparison with EVI 1, alongside new options like dynamic voice customization and in-conversation type prompts.
February 2025 noticed the debut of Octave, a text-to-speech engine for content material creators able to adjusting feelings on the sentence stage with textual content prompts.
With EVI 3 now accessible for hands-on exploration and full API entry simply across the nook, Hume hopes to permit builders and creators to reimagine what’s attainable with voice AI.
Each day insights on enterprise use circumstances with VB Each day
If you wish to impress your boss, VB Each day has you lined. We provide the inside scoop on what firms are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to sensible deployments, so you possibly can share insights for max ROI.
An error occured.
