Hume AI
Hume AI / hume.ai
AI API specialising in emotional intelligence — analysing vocal emotion, facial expression, and physiological signals in real time, and generating empathic voice responses that adapt tone to user emotional state.
Pricing
Free
Free plan
Yes
Category
Developer Tools
Platforms
2
Free plan
Yes
API access
Yes
Open source
No
Platforms
2
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What is Hume AI?
Hume AI is an AI company focused on emotional intelligence, providing APIs that understand and respond to human emotional signals across voice, face, and physiological channels. Founded by expression measurement researchers, Hume's models are trained on large-scale datasets of human emotional expression to produce AI that responds to how people feel, not just what they say.
Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) is Hume's flagship product — a voice AI that understands vocal expression (tone, pace, pitch patterns) in real time and generates responses with emotionally appropriate prosody. Unlike standard voice AI that treats all inputs neutrally, EVI adapts its response tone to the detected emotional state — a user who sounds frustrated receives a more empathic response tone than one who sounds matter-of-fact.
The expression measurement APIs analyse facial expressions from video, vocal expressions from audio, and physiological signals (heart rate, skin conductance) to classify emotional states across 48 emotional dimensions. These APIs power applications in healthcare (patient emotion monitoring), education (student engagement), and entertainment (adaptive game characters).
Hume's research foundation includes the publication of large-scale empirical studies on emotional expression that informed their model training data collection and labelling methodology — distinguishing their approach from sentiment analysis tools that rely on simpler data.
At $0.07/minute for EVI, Hume is accessible for developers exploring empathic AI interaction, with free tier access for evaluation.
How Hume AI works
Hume AI runs as audio processing ai software built around audio and video workflows. Users typically start with a prompt, upload, or connected data source, and the underlying model handles the heavy lifting before returning a result you can refine or export. It's available on web and api, with API access for teams that want to embed it into their own products.
Watch Hume AI in action
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What makes it worth shortlisting
The capabilities that matter most for teams evaluating Hume AI.
Empathic Voice Interface
Voice AI that analyses vocal emotional expression in real time and generates responses with appropriate emotional tone, adapting how it sounds to match the user's detected emotional state.
Expression measurement APIs
Analyse facial expressions, vocal tone, and physiological signals across 48 emotional dimensions for applications requiring real-time understanding of user emotional states.
Research foundation
Models trained on large-scale empirical emotional expression datasets with published research, providing scientific credibility for high-stakes emotional AI applications.
Best use cases
Who should use it
Pros
- Unique emotional AI capability distinguishes voice applications from standard speech AI competitors
- EVI's empathic tone adaptation produces more natural-feeling voice interactions
- Research foundation provides credibility for high-stakes emotional AI applications
- $0.07/min pricing and free tier allow accessible developer evaluation
Cons
- Emotional AI is an emerging field — evaluation benchmarks and quality standards are still developing
- Privacy and ethical concerns around emotional data collection require careful user disclosure and consent
- Healthcare applications require additional regulatory review beyond standard AI privacy frameworks
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Is it worth the price?
Free tier with limited API calls. Pay-as-you-go from $0.07/min. Enterprise custom. Research access available.
Model
Usage-based
Starting price
Free
Free trial
No
Tools like Hume AI
Vapi AI (rank 438) provides voice AI infrastructure without emotional adaptation. OpenAI Realtime API (rank 446) provides natural voice AI without emotional analysis. Affectiva (iMotions) provides facial expression measurement for research. Replika (covered) uses similar emotional AI principles in consumer context.
Hume AI vs OpenAI Realtime API
A side-by-side look at the closest alternative in this category.
Hume AI
Hume AI
OpenAI Realtime API
OpenAI
Free tier with limited API calls. Pay-as-you-go from $0.07/min. Enterprise custom. Research access available.
Pay-as-you-go. Audio input $0.06/min, audio output $0.24/min (as of 2025). Text within realtime sessions at standard GPT-4o rates. No free tier.
Review Hume AI's data handling policy. Audio and video streams processed on Hume's infrastructure. Review implications for sensitive emotional data in healthcare applications.
Review OpenAI's data handling policy. Audio streams processed on OpenAI's infrastructure. Review Enterprise data handling terms for sensitive audio applications.
Emotional data including voice tone and facial expressions is sensitive. Review Hume AI's privacy policy carefully before collecting emotional signals from users, particularly in healthcare and mental health contexts.
Audio data processed on OpenAI's servers. By default, audio is not used for training. Review OpenAI's API data handling policy for sensitive voice applications.
- Unique emotional AI capability distinguishes voice applications from standard speech AI competitors
- EVI's empathic tone adaptation produces more natural-feeling voice interactions
- Research foundation provides credibility for high-stakes emotional AI applications
- $0.07/min pricing and free tier allow accessible developer evaluation
- Native audio processing preserves emotional cues and prosody lost in STT-text-TTS pipelines
- Sub-second latency enables natural conversational AI experiences matching human conversation speed
- Same technology powering ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode provides validated quality benchmark
- Function calling in voice enables voice AI agents that complete tasks rather than only answering questions
- Emotional AI is an emerging field — evaluation benchmarks and quality standards are still developing
- Privacy and ethical concerns around emotional data collection require careful user disclosure and consent
- Healthcare applications require additional regulatory review beyond standard AI privacy frameworks
- $0.24/min audio output pricing accumulates quickly for high-volume voice applications
- WebSocket architecture requires different implementation approach than standard REST API calls
- Limited to GPT-4o — no model flexibility for latency vs cost trade-offs
Technical & deployment info
Key facts about model providers, platforms, and team support.
Model Provider
Hume AI
Models
EVI
Platforms
Web, API
Deployment
SaaS, API
Integrations
WebSocket, LangChain, API
Team Collaboration
No
Launch Year
2024
Security & privacy
Compliance signals and data-handling notes as reported by the vendor.
Review Hume AI's data handling policy. Audio and video streams processed on Hume's infrastructure. Review implications for sensitive emotional data in healthcare applications.
Emotional data including voice tone and facial expressions is sensitive. Review Hume AI's privacy policy carefully before collecting emotional signals from users, particularly in healthcare and mental health contexts.
What users are saying
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Common questions about Hume AI
Editorial Verdict
Should you use Hume AI?
Hume AI is the best API for developers who want voice AI with genuine emotional intelligence — adapting tone to user emotional state — particularly for mental health, wellness, healthcare, and education applications.
Last verified July 24, 2026.