Hume AI

Text To Speech

Hume AI builds emotionally intelligent voice AI centered on its Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) speech-to-speech models and Octave text-to-speech models, which understand and express emotional nuance in tone. Developers use Hume's API to build voice agents, support bots, and TTS applications that adapt tone to context and detected emotion. It serves developers and product teams building conversational voice products.

Alternatives & similar tools

Other tools in our directory you may want to compare.

Also mentioned

ElevenLabs (broader TTS and voice cloning ecosystem)
OpenAI Realtime API (speech-to-speech via GPT models)
Cartesia (low-latency voice AI infrastructure)

Features & details

Full overview from our catalog (read-only reference).

Category (short)

Text To Speech

Sponsored note

Target audience

Developers and product teams building conversational voice AI that needs emotionally nuanced speech rather than flat, monotone TTS. Not ideal for: teams needing simple, high-volume flat-rate TTS without emotional modeling, or non-technical users wanting a no-code voice product.

Best for

Pricing notes

Verified July 2026 at hume.ai/pricing. Free plan: $0/month with 10,000 TTS characters and 5 EVI minutes included. Paid tiers: Starter $3/month (30,000 characters), Creator $7/month for the first month then $14/month (140,000 characters, $0.15 per 1,000 extra), Pro $70/month (1,000,000 characters, $0.12 per 1,000 extra, $0.06/minute extra EVI), Scale $200/month (3,300,000 characters, $0.10 per 1,000 extra), Business $500/month (10,000,000 characters, $0.05 per 1,000 extra, 5 team seats), and a custom Enterprise tier with SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance plus Slack support.

Pros & cons

Editorial notes to help compare fit before opening the vendor site.

Pros

Emotionally expressive, natural-sounding voice output
Very low-cost entry tiers starting at $3/month
Unlimited voice cloning included on all plans, including Free
Enterprise compliance available (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR)

Cons

Support is Discord-only below the Enterprise tier
Usage-based overage costs can add up quickly at scale
Smaller developer ecosystem and community than ElevenLabs
EVI speech-to-speech is metered per minute on top of the subscription

Review notes

Context from the listing review and editorial research.

Hume AI positions itself around published "empathic AI" research on vocal emotional expression. No meaningful disambiguation risk found for this name.

Extended features

In-depth description and capability notes.

EVI 3 and EVI 4 mini speech-to-speech conversational voice models Octave 1 and Octave 2 expressive text-to-speech models Unlimited voice cloning included on every plan Support for connecting external LLMs to voice conversations Real-time emotion and prosody measurement research tools Scaling concurrent connections for production-grade deployments API-first platform with SDKs for developer integration Team and organization collaboration features on higher tiers

Use cases

Startups build empathic voice assistants or AI companions, customer service teams deploy voice agents that respond with contextually appropriate tone, and researchers use Hume's measurement APIs to study vocal expression.