Sometimes AI voices can sound a tad robotic, failing to capture the emotion behind the words that human’s speak.
But step forward Hume. It can generate voices that sound more realistic and emotionally intelligent so that conversations are almost indistinguishable from real life.
It can shout, express sarcasm, whisper and more, while allowing you to create an AI voice with a simple prompt or script.
So let’s check out exactly what it can do and why you should consider using it. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be so impressed you’ll be using it to shout from the rooftops.
This article was correct as of March 2025. AI tools are updated regularly and it is possible that some features have changed since this article was written. Some features may also only be available in certain countries.
What is Hume?
Named after a Scottish philosopher called David Hume who said emotions were fundamental to human nature and drove our actions and moral judgments, the AI platform Hume was founded in 2021 with a clear objective: to ensure AI takes emotional well-being into account.
Having claimed that “emotional intelligence is the missing ingredient needed to build AI systems that proactively find ways to improve your quality of life”, Hume offers a way to use AI voices laden with emotional expression
By describing a voice in detail – noting how loud it should be, the sort of person speaking, the qualities associated with the voice, gender and more – Hume will give you a choice of voices that should closely match what you’re after.
Hume, set up by former Google DeepMind scientist Alan Cowen, also allows you to select a voice and a language model (be that Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Flash, GPT 4.0, Llama 405b or the flagship Hume EVI 2) and engage in a verbal conversation. It will pick up on your voice and the words you utter and respond in an emotionally relevant way.
What’s more, if you use the app for iOS and Android, you can select from a range of pre-created voices and hold conversations that can dish out life advice, allow you to emotionally reflect, tell stories, give spiritual advice and answer questions.
What can you use Hume for?
Although you’re able to play around with Hume to see exactly what it’s capable of (the app being a good example of this), it’s primarily aimed at creators who may want a rich voice for podcasts, voiceovers, audiobooks and more. It’s also amazing for developers who want to build and use emotional voice AI into their applications. To that end, it could handle customer service or tech queries in a more human-like way, using the power of an underlying language model to carry out and complete tasks.
As well as saving money in a professional setting, the ability for Hume to hold fluent conversations and react to users in a split second can reduce the frustration often felt by humans communicating with verbal AIs. Hume has offered some real-life case studies of the AI in use, saying it’s being use to transform thought leadership and enabling healthcare providers to offer a physician-guided AI that can analyse and explain health results appropriately.
What can’t you use Hume for?
Hume will answer questions, dish out facts and allow you to explore new ideas, it’s not aiming to be an all-encompassing AI. So while you can ask it anything and have engaging interactions that are on a par with a conversation with a friend, it’s not going to start generating videos or images for you and it won’t start writing reports and essays. It’s not possible to clone a voice either, but that seems to be on the cards in the future.
How much does Hume cost?
You can use the smartphone app version of Hume for free and access the consumer-facing aspects of Hume in a browser without paying – the latter will allow you to type 10,000 characters of text and produce unlimited custom voices. But if you want to go beyond that and gain a commercial license, then the Starter tier costs $3 / £2 / AU$5 a month for 20 projects, the Creator tier is $10 / £8 / AU$16 a month for 1,000 projects and Pro is $50 / £39 / AU$80 a month for 3,000 projects. There’s a Scale tier at $150 / £116 / AU$238 a month and a Business tier for $900 / £700 / AU$1,400 a month but they’re aimed very much at large organisations.
Where can you use Hume?
You can use Hume on the web. You can also access Hume on an iPhone or iPad by visiting Apple’s App Store. The latter gives you access to a range of chatbots that will tell stories, give life and spiritual advice or answer questions both deep and quick.
Is Hume any good?
Play around with the text-to-speech part of the website and you may not be all that impressed. The voices can sound as if they’ve been computer-generated. But select speech-to-speech, choose a voice and model and start talking and you are likely to be blown away. The EVI 2 model is exceptional and it will adapt its voice to how you speak. It’s very easy to forget that you’re not talking to a human because of the tone, intonation and emotion evident in the voices. You can have a rather engaging conversation if you so wish.
Use Hume if…
You want to create human-like voices that can understand emotion and respond appropriately.
You’d like to engage with a chatbot that feels as if you’re talking to a friend.
You want to produce audiobooks, voiceovers, podcasts and more.
Don’t use Hume if…
You want an AI that is able to clone a specific voice. It’s not available yet.
You want an AI which is truly able to know what you’re thinking: that’s just a bit too advanced.
You are worried that you could become addicted to chatting to a realistic-sounding chatbot.
Also consider
ElevenLabs generates natural, emotive, and highly realistic voiceovers across 32 languages (and counting).
Speechify When it comes to turning text into speech then Speechify has the answers to your prayers.
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