Full-Time
Posted on 8/9/2025
Offers emotion-aware AI datasets and models
$170k - $250k/yr
Remote in USA + 2 more
More locations: San Jose, CA, USA | New York, NY, USA
Hybrid
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Hume AI provides large-scale training datasets and AI models to help build systems that understand and respond to human emotions. It focuses on integrating empathy into AI across applications such as social networks, digital assistants, health tech, and education. The product works by offering scientifically-backed datasets and models that can detect and respond to users' emotional states, grounded in research on over 30 distinct emotions. This makes it possible for developers to create emotionally aware products that improve user experience and well-being. The company differentiates itself with a strong emphasis on empirical emotional science and empathy-driven capabilities, rather than generic AI tools. Its goal is to ensure AI serves human goals and emotional well-being by providing tools that enable empathic technology.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
Series B
Total Funding
$75.7M
Headquarters
New York City, New York
Founded
2021
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Hume AI launches TADA, a fast open-source voice system that eliminates hallucinations. 10/03/2026 Hume AI releases TADA under an open-source license, a text-to-speech system that synchronizes text and audio to eliminate content errors and achieve five times the speed of current systems. Hume AI has released TADA (Text-Acoustic Dual Alignment), a voice generation system that addresses one of the most common problems in current large language model-based systems: the mismatch between how text and audio are represented. Conventional text-to-speech systems generate between 12.5 and 75 acoustic signal frames per second of audio, compared to just 2 or 3 text tokens. This gap forces models to handle very long sequences, which slows down processing and increases the risk of the system skipping words or inserting non-existent content - a flaw known as hallucination. TADA resolves this imbalance with a tokenization scheme that assigns exactly one continuous acoustic vector per text token. As a result, text and audio are processed in parallel and at the same rate, without compressing the audio or adding extra intermediate layers. In terms of speed, the system achieves a real-time factor of 0.09 - more than five times faster than comparable LLM-based text-to-speech systems. In tests with over 1,000 samples from the LibriTTSR dataset, the model produced zero hallucinations. In human evaluations on expressive, long-form speech, it scored 4.18 out of 5 for speaker similarity and 3.78 out of 5 for naturalness, ranking second overall. The model's compact size allows it to run on mobile devices without relying on cloud services. In terms of context management, it can handle up to 700 seconds of audio within a 2,048-token context window, compared to around 70 seconds for conventional systems under the same conditions. Hume AI is releasing two versions: a one-billion-parameter model for English and a three-billion-parameter multilingual model supporting eight languages. Both are available on Hugging Face under an open-source license. The researchers themselves acknowledge limitations still to be resolved, including potential speaker drift during very long generations and reduced text quality when generating text and speech simultaneously. Key points. * TADA is a new open-source text-to-speech system developed by Hume AI. * It synchronizes text and audio in a 1:1 ratio, eliminating the mismatch in current systems. * It is more than five times faster than comparable LLM-based TTS systems. * In tests with over 1,000 samples, it produced zero hallucinations. * It is lightweight enough to run on mobile devices without a cloud connection. * It can handle up to 700 seconds of audio versus 70 seconds in conventional systems. * Available in two versions: 1B parameters in English and 3B multilingual across eight languages. * Still has limitations in very long generations and when combining text and speech simultaneously. Videos. Links. Related AI. Interfaz de voz con inteligencia emocional. Research laboratory and technology company specialized in AI models with emotional intelligence. Its main model integrates voice and language processing, with adjustable voice synthesis in timbre,... Lastest news. * Copilot Cowork, the AI agent that manages and executes tasks within Microsoft 365 09/03/2026 Microsoft has announced Copilot Cowork, a new Microsoft 365 Copilot feature that goes beyond chat to execute complete tasks autonomously,... * OpenAI launches GPT-5.4, its most powerful AI model for professional work 05/03/2026 OpenAI has released GPT-5.4, a model that combines advanced reasoning, coding and computer control into a single tool designed for complex... * Anthropic refuses to back down against the Pentagon while OpenAI signs an alternative deal 02/03/2026 Anthropic rejects removing two restrictions on its AI's use by the military, in a conflict that led Trump to order its removal from all federal... * Perplexity Computer, the system that coordinates multiple AI models at once 25/02/2026 Perplexity introduces Computer, an AI agent capable of creating and executing complete workflows for hours or months, autonomously coordinating...
Hume AI, a voice AI research company, has appointed Andrew Ettinger as chief executive officer. Ettinger brings 15 years of experience in data and AI infrastructure, having built teams responsible for over $2 billion in annual recurring revenue at Pivotal, Astronomer and Appen, where he most recently served as chief revenue officer. The company has also agreed to non-exclusively licence certain technologies to Google, with co-founder Alan Cowen joining Google. Hume has been expanding its research platform, including voice evaluation tools, data pipelines and reinforcement-learning infrastructure for training voice AI models. Ettinger said Hume is on track to generate more than $100 million in revenue this year from research partnerships with frontier AI labs and enterprises. The company plans to release the next generation of its text-to-speech and speech-to-speech models shortly.
Google DeepMind has hired Hume AI's CEO Alan Cowen and approximately seven engineers as part of a licensing agreement with the AI voice startup. Financial terms were not disclosed, though Hume AI will continue supplying its technology to other AI labs. Hume AI specialises in emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, training models to detect and respond to emotional cues in users' voices. The company has raised $74 million and expects $100 million in revenue by 2026. Cowen, who holds a PhD in psychology, will help Google integrate voice and emotional intelligence into its frontier models. The deal positions Google to compete more aggressively with OpenAI's ChatGPT voice mode and follows Google's partnership with Apple to power Siri with Gemini. The arrangement represents another talent acquisition that avoids traditional merger oversight.
Niantic's Peridot, the augmented reality alien dog, is now a talking tour guide | WIRED. Niantic is giving its cute AR cartoon companions a voice that will let them guide you around in the real world and point out interesting facts. The feature is being demo'd first in Snap Spectacles. Imagine you're walking your dog. It interacts with the world around you - sniffing some things, relieving itself on others. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in the eye, and says, "Did you know this waterfront was blocked by piers and a freeway for 100 years?" OK now imagine your dog looks like an alien and only you can see it. That's the vision for a new capability created for the Niantic Labs AR experience Peridot. Niantic, also the developer of the worldwide AR behemoth Pokémon Go, hopes to build out its vision of extending the metaverse into the real world by giving people the means to augment the space around them with digital artifacts. Peridot is a mobile game that lets users customize and interact with their own little Dots - dog-sized digital companions that appear on your phone's screen and can look like they're interacting with the world objects in the view of your camera lens. They're very cute, and yes, they look a lot like Pokémon. Now, they can talk. Peridot started as a mobile game in 2022, then got infused with generative AI features. The game has since moved into the hands of Niantic Spatial, a startup created in April that aims to turn geospatial data into an accessible playground for its AR ambitions. Now called Peridot Beyond, it has been enabled in Snap's Spectacles. Hume AI, a startup running a large language model that aims to make chatbots seem more empathetic, is now partnering with Niantic Spatial to bring a voice to the Dots on Snap's Spectacles. The move was initially announced in September, but now it's ready for the public and will be demonstrated at Snap's Lens Fest developer event this week.
Reality Defender partners with Hume AI to advance responsible Voice AI development.