Hume AI
FreemiumEmpathic voice AI that hears emotion and responds in real time
Quick verdict
Voice agents that need to detect and respond to emotion in real time
Pure voice cloning at scale or low-cost narration projects
Free · Starter $3/mo · Creator $7/mo · Pro $70/mo · Scale $200/mo · Business $500/mo
Yes · 10K characters and 5 EVI minutes per month
Real-time emotion detection across 50+ vocal dimensions
Pricing scales with concurrent connections, not just minutes
Bottom line: Hume AI scores 4.4/5 in our voice and TTS tests. If your product depends on reading sentiment in conversation, no other public API gets closer.
What is Hume AI?
Hume AI is an emotion-aware voice AI platform that combines two flagship products: the Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) for real-time conversational agents and Octave TTS for expressive text-to-speech. Where most voice tools focus on how clear a voice sounds, Hume measures how it feels — analyzing prosody, vocal bursts, and facial expressions across more than 50 emotional dimensions, then steering its replies to match. The platform ships REST and WebSocket APIs that you can drop into a support agent, a mental-health companion, a game NPC, or an accessibility tool. You can start free with 10,000 TTS characters and 5 EVI minutes per month, and scale to enterprise volumes inside the same SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA-eligible environment.
Hume AI pricing
Verified May 2026 from hume.ai/pricing. All prices in USD per month. Octave TTS is character-based, EVI is minute-based.
| Plan | Price | TTS (Octave) | EVI minutes | Concurrent calls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 chars (~10 min) | 5 min | 1 |
| Starter | $3/mo | 30,000 chars | 40 min, $0.07/min overage | 5 |
| Creator | $7/mo | 140,000 chars | 200 min, $0.07/min overage | 5 |
| Pro | $70/mo | 1,000,000 chars | 1,200 min, $0.06/min overage | 10 |
| Scale | $200/mo | 3,300,000 chars | 5,000 min, $0.05/min overage | 20 |
| Business | $500/mo | 10,000,000 chars | 12,500 min, $0.04/min overage | 30 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom volume | Custom + Slack support | Custom |
Pro and above include SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA-aligned terms. Starter currently shows a 50% first-month promo on the Hume site. Watch concurrent connection caps if you run a busy contact center — that limit, more than minutes, often forces an upgrade.
10,000 characters and 5 minutes is enough to ship a working prototype before you spend a dollar.
Key features
- Empathic Voice Interface (EVI): low-latency conversational voice agent that detects vocal emotion in real time and adapts tone, pacing, and content as the call unfolds.
- Octave TTS: expressive text-to-speech with steerable emotion, voice design prompts, and multilingual output for narration, IVR, and product UX.
- Expression Measurement API: standalone API for vocal, facial, and language emotion analysis across 50+ dimensions, useful for QA, research, and behavioral analytics.
- Multimodal emotion analysis: combine voice, face, and text streams in one request for richer signals in customer support, gaming, and clinical research.
- Custom voice fine-tuning: design new voices from text prompts, or adapt Octave to brand persona without uploading hours of source audio.
- WebSocket and REST APIs: stream audio in and out with sub-second latency, with SDKs for TypeScript, Python, and React.
- Compliance and controls: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA-aligned terms on Pro and above; admin team seats; usage-based billing dashboards.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Best public API for real-time emotion-aware voice
- Generous free tier (10K chars and 5 min EVI per month)
- Steerable, expressive Octave TTS with prompt-based voice design
- SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA-aligned on Pro and up
- Sub-second EVI latency on production tiers
Cons
- Emotion AI raises ethical and bias questions you have to address with users
- Pricing scales with concurrent calls, so contact centers can outgrow tiers fast
- Narrower use case than general TTS like ElevenLabs or Murf
- Voice catalog is smaller than competitor libraries
- Onboarding skews developer-heavy compared to no-code TTS tools
Best for
- Sales and support call centers that want voice agents to read frustration or confusion and escalate before a customer churns.
- Mental health and wellness apps where tone matters as much as words and emotional rapport drives retention.
- Gaming and interactive dialogue studios that need NPCs to react to a player's actual mood, not just their text input.
- Accessibility tools that translate emotion cues for users with sensory or communication differences.
- Product teams researching UX who want vocal sentiment data alongside session recordings.
If you build voice products, you can have a working empathic agent in an afternoon.
Good to know
Sign up at hume.ai, grab an API key from the dashboard, and use the TypeScript, Python, or React SDKs. Most teams have an EVI demo running in under an hour. No installation needed for the playground.
Hume is SOC 2 Type II audited, GDPR-aligned, and offers HIPAA-aligned terms on Pro and above. Customer audio is not used for model training by default; check the data processing addendum if you handle clinical or minor data.
EVI streams over WebSocket and typically lands sub-second from the user's audio to the model's first audio token, which is the bar for natural turn-taking. Latency tightens on Pro and up.
Octave does prompt-based voice design rather than uploaded-clip cloning, which sidesteps a lot of the consent and impersonation risk that hits ElevenLabs and Resemble. Confirm voice rights with Hume support before commercial release.
Move to Creator ($7) once you ship a real prototype, Pro ($70) when you need HIPAA-aligned terms or 10 concurrent calls, and Scale ($200)+ when contact-center load forces 20+ concurrent connections.
Hume AI alternatives
Same category — voice and TTS — ranked by where they beat Hume.
- ElevenLabs — best general-purpose TTS, deepest voice library, strong cloning. Pick this for narration, audiobooks, podcasts.
- Murf AI — best studio interface for marketing voiceover and corporate narration with team collaboration.
- Play.ht — strong real-time agent voices, cheaper concurrent-call pricing for high-volume telephony.
- Resemble AI — enterprise voice cloning with custom security and on-prem options for regulated industries.
- Speechify — best consumer TTS for reading articles and PDFs aloud, with mobile and browser apps.
Compare Hume AI with alternatives
ToolChase editor's pick is starred. Pricing entry-level, verified May 2026.
| Tool | Score | Free plan | Entry price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hume AI ★ | 4.4 | 10K chars + 5 min | Free / $3 | Empathic real-time voice agents |
| ElevenLabs | 4.7 | 10K chars/mo | Free / $5 | Best general TTS, voice cloning |
| Murf AI | 4.5 | 10 min | Free / $19 | Studio voiceover for marketing |
| Play.ht | 4.4 | 2,500 words | Free / $39 | Real-time agent and IVR voices |
| Resemble AI | 4.3 | Trial | $29 | Enterprise voice cloning |
| Speechify | 4.4 | Limited | Free / $11.58 | Consumer reading TTS |
| Replica Studios | 4.2 | Trial | $24 | Game and film character voices |
| OpenAI TTS | 4.3 | API only | $15/1M chars | Developer TTS for the ChatGPT stack |
| Amazon Polly | 4.1 | Free tier (12 mo) | $4/1M chars | AWS-native, low-cost narration |
| Google Cloud TTS | 4.1 | Free tier (1M chars) | $4/1M chars | GCP-native multilingual TTS |
Hume keeps the editor's pick because no other API on this list pairs sub-second voice with native emotion analysis. ElevenLabs still wins on raw audio quality and library size.
Ready to try it?
Sign up freeExplore more
Bottom line
Hume AI is the right call when emotion is the product. If you're building a support agent that needs to recognize a frustrated caller, a wellness app where tone defines retention, or a game that should respond to how a player feels rather than what they say, EVI plus Octave gets you closer than any other public API. For pure narration or audiobook voice cloning, ElevenLabs or Murf will be cheaper and faster. Start on the free tier, prototype against EVI's WebSocket, and only commit to Pro or Scale once you've measured how concurrent calls move with your traffic — that's the lever that decides your true monthly cost.
Sign up free, generate your API key, and ship an EVI prototype this week.
FAQ
Is Hume AI free?
Yes. Hume's free tier gives you 10,000 Octave TTS characters (about 10 minutes of audio) and 5 EVI minutes per month, with one concurrent connection and 15 requests per minute. It's enough to evaluate the platform and ship a working prototype. Paid plans start at $3 per month for Starter and $7 per month for Creator.
Hume vs ElevenLabs — which should you choose?
ElevenLabs wins on raw voice quality, voice library size, and audiobook-style narration. Hume wins on real-time conversational agents that need to read emotion in the user's voice and respond accordingly. If you need a single voice reading a script, ElevenLabs is usually the better and cheaper pick. If you're building a support, wellness, or gaming agent that needs to react to mood in real time, Hume is the right tool.
What is the Empathic Voice Interface?
EVI is Hume's real-time conversational voice API. It listens to the user's audio over a WebSocket, infers emotional state from prosody and vocal bursts, and streams a spoken reply back with sub-second latency. The model adjusts pacing, tone, and content based on what it hears, so the agent can de-escalate frustration or match excitement instead of replying flat.
How does Hume's emotion AI work?
Hume's models are trained on a research dataset of emotional speech, vocal bursts, and facial expressions collected with consent. They output scores across more than 50 dimensions — calmness, distress, amusement, confusion, and so on — for each chunk of voice or video. EVI uses those scores to steer responses, while the Expression Measurement API exposes them directly for analytics or QA pipelines.
What is Hume API pricing?
Octave TTS is priced by characters per month and EVI by minutes, with concurrent connection caps on each tier. Free covers 10K chars and 5 min. Starter ($3) adds 30K chars and 40 min. Creator ($7) adds 140K chars and 200 min. Pro ($70) jumps to 1M chars and 1,200 min plus HIPAA-aligned terms. Scale ($200) and Business ($500) cover production contact-center volumes. Overage rates drop with each tier, from $0.07 per EVI minute on Starter down to $0.04 on Business.
Can you use Hume AI for HIPAA workloads?
Yes, on Pro ($70) and above. Hume offers HIPAA-aligned terms, SOC 2 Type II reports, and GDPR-compliant data processing on those tiers. You'll need to sign a BAA before sending protected health information; ask the Hume team during onboarding.
Does Hume AI support voice cloning?
Hume's Octave does prompt-based voice design rather than uploaded-clip cloning. You describe the voice you want, and Octave generates it. That avoids most of the consent and impersonation risks that come with cloning a real person's voice. If you need true cloning, ElevenLabs or Resemble AI are better fits.