Hume EVI
https://dev.hume.ai/voice/docs/speech-to-speech-evi/overview
Hume's Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) — voice agent platform with vocal-affect understanding, using Hume's proprietary speech-prosody models. Hume will shut down the EVI and TTS APIs on 2026-11-13 (announced in its docs). Hume raised $50M Series B Mar-2024 (EQT).
Shut down · Verified 2026-10-29 · fresh as of 2026-10-29 · 47 cited facts, 2 with a third-party source · 3 recorded changes · Suggest a correction
At a glance
- Type
- Empathic voice-AI platform (voice + emotion) vendor fix
- Tier
- T1
- Section
- Voice agent platforms
- Created
- 2024 (EVI launched; Hume founded 2021) vendor fix
- Latest release
- EVI 3 and EVI 4-mini; the EVI API shuts down on 2026-11-13 vendor fix
- License
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- GitHub
- HumeAI org (SDKs/examples; hume-api-examples ~250 stars, updated 2026-10) — EVI service closed source repo fix
- Pricing
- Per-minute usage; tiered + Enterprise vendor fix
- Funding
- $50M Series B Mar-2024 (EQT) third-party fix
- Freshness
- 2026-10-29 fix
- Layer
- agent-infra repo fix
- Licensing
- commercial vendor fix
When to use
Optimised for: Emotion-aware voice agents; therapy + companion apps
Anti-fit: Empathic / emotion focus — overkill if you just want plain voice agent
Pros & cons
Pros
Unique empathic/emotion layer; SOC 2 + HIPAA; founder research credentials; clean SDKs.
Cons
Niche positioning; smaller than Vapi/Retell at agent-orchestration layer; emotion-model interpretability concerns.
Claims & capabilities
$50M Series B Mar-2024 (EQT); proprietary emotion + prosody models; EVI 2 released 2024
Technical surface
- API surface
- WebSocket + REST APIs + SDKs (Python, JS, React Native)
- Backend storage
- Session state in Hume cloud
- Deployment
- Cloud-managed
- Embedding model
- not applicable — not a memory product
- Multi-tenancy
- Multi-tenant cloud
- MCP
- yes — official MCP server (HumeAI/mcp-server-hume)
- A2A
- searched not found
- OpenTelemetry
- searched not found
Alternatives to Hume EVI → live options ranked by shared design, licence, hosting and MCP support
Similar systems
Other voice agent platforms in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
- Cartesia Sonic T1
Cartesia's Sonic TTS — state-space-model-based voice generation, lowest published TTS latency (~40ms). Cartesia raised $64M Series A Q1 2025 (Index + Lightspeed); founded by Mamba authors. Agent platform layer ('Cartesia Line') wraps Sonic with telephony + LLM.
- LiveKit Agents T1
LiveKit Agents — agent framework built on LiveKit's open-source WebRTC media server. LiveKit raised $45M Series B Sep-2024 ($300M val). Powers OpenAI Realtime API's WebRTC transport (LiveKit is the substrate OpenAI chose). Agents framework formally launched 2024.
- ElevenLabs Conversational AI (now ElevenAgents) T1
ElevenLabs launched Conversational AI Nov-2024 — STT + LLM + their own market-leading TTS in one pipeline. Combines vendor's voice cloning + multilingual TTS strengths with hosted call orchestration. ElevenLabs raised $180M Series C Jan-2025 at $3.3B val. As of 2026-10 ElevenLabs markets the platform as ElevenAgents.
- OpenAI Realtime API T1
OpenAI's Realtime API for native speech-to-speech multimodal interaction with GPT-4o — launched Oct 2024 (DevDay). Skips the STT → LLM → TTS pipeline by passing speech directly to GPT-4o. The platform substrate that Vapi/Retell/Bland integrate as one of their LLM choices.
- Pipecat (Daily) T1
Open-source Python framework for real-time voice + multimodal AI agents, maintained by Daily.co. Pipeline-style architecture (STT → context → LLM → TTS) wired over WebRTC. The OSS substrate that many of the voice platforms build on or compose with.
- Speechmatics Flow T2
Speechmatics (UK; STT leader) launched Flow Q4 2024 — conversational voice-agent platform composed on Speechmatics STT + caller LLM. Speechmatics raised $62M Series B (2022); enterprise + media customers. UK / EU data-residency lead. As of 2026-10 the Flow pages and docs redirect to Agent STT, a speech-to-text API for voice agents (Linden model, from $0.30/hour) used via LiveKit, Pipecat or the API; Flow itself is no longer listed.
Sources (46 cited facts, 2 third-party)
Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).
- What it is Empathic voice-AI platform (voice + emotion) vendor
- What it does & what's distinct Hume's Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) — voice agent platform with vocal-affect understan… vendor
- Claims / benefits $50M Series B Mar-2024 (EQT); proprietary emotion + prosody models; EVI 2 released 2024 vendor
- Modalities voice + text + emotion vectors vendor
- Created 2024 (EVI launched; Hume founded 2021) vendor
- Latest release EVI 3 and EVI 4-mini; the EVI API shuts down on 2026-11-13 vendor
- GitHub HumeAI org (SDKs/examples; hume-api-examples ~250 stars, updated 2026-10) — EVI service … repo
- Mindshare Distinctive 'empathic' positioning; HN + media coverage; growing devrel vendor
- Citations Founder Alan Cowen has prosody/emotion research paper
- Funding $50M Series B Mar-2024 (EQT) third-party
- Customers / scale Customers in therapy/mental-health, gaming, customer support vendor
- Pricing Per-minute usage; tiered + Enterprise vendor
- Compliance SOC 2 Type II; HIPAA vendor
- Data handling Configurable retention; HIPAA BAA vendor
- Deployment Cloud-managed vendor
- HQ US (New York) vendor
- Founders / pedigree Alan Cowen (ex-Google Brain emotion research) vendor
- Performance <1s turn latency; published EVI 2 benchmarks vendor
- API surface WebSocket + REST APIs + SDKs (Python, JS, React Native) vendor
- Latency p50/p99 <1s turn-to-turn vendor
- Backend storage Session state in Hume cloud vendor
- Multi-tenancy Multi-tenant cloud vendor
- Encryption TLS + AES-256 vendor
- SSO / RBAC SSO on Enterprise vendor
- Versioning Configs versioned in dashboard vendor
- Tombstoning User-delete vendor
- Namespace primitives per-org / per-config vendor
- Forgetting policy Configurable retention vendor
- MCP support yes — official MCP server (HumeAI/mcp-server-hume) repo
- Webhooks / events Webhooks for session events vendor
- Import / export Config JSON-exportable vendor
- Validated verticals therapy / mental health, gaming, customer support vendor
- Time to running <30min (API key + SDK) vendor
- Anti-fit Empathic / emotion focus — overkill if you just want plain voice agent vendor
- Optimised for Emotion-aware voice agents; therapy + companion apps vendor
- Adjacent infrastructure Twilio (telephony); Anthropic / OpenAI LLMs (or Hume's eLLM) vendor
- Pros Unique empathic/emotion layer; SOC 2 + HIPAA; founder research credentials; clean SDKs. vendor
- Cons Niche positioning; smaller than Vapi/Retell at agent-orchestration layer; emotion-model … vendor
- Project & sources hume.ai/products/empathic-voice-interface; dev.hume.ai/docs vendor
- cost-pricing-model subscription vendor
- cost-last-verified 2026-06-29 vendor
- adoption-accelerator ai-grant third-party
- architecture-deployment-locus cloud vendor
- licensing-bucket commercial vendor
- positioning-platform-vs-product platform vendor
- taxonomy-three-layer-rollup agent-infra repo
What changed
Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)
- 2026-10-29
- Homepage “https://www.hume.ai/products/empathic-voice-interface” → “https://dev.hume.ai/voice/docs/speech-to-speech-evi/overview”
- 2026-10-28
- Latest release “EVI 2 (2024-09)” → “EVI 3 and EVI 4-mini; the EVI API shuts down on 2026-11-13” source
- 2026-10-26
- MCP support first recorded as “yes — official MCP server (HumeAI/mcp-server-hume)” source
Related systems
References (2)
- Anthropic Claude (foundation models) depends on at runtime — adjacent-infrastructure cell: Twilio (telephony); Anthropic / OpenAI LLMs (or Hume's eLLM)
- OpenAI GPT family (GPT-5 / GPT-4o / o3 / o4) depends on at runtime — adjacent-infrastructure cell: Twilio (telephony); Anthropic / OpenAI LLMs (or Hume's eLLM)
Referenced by (3)
- LiveKit Agents integrates with — LiveKit Agents docs have a Hume EVI model plugin page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Pipecat (Daily) integrates with — Pipecat docs have a Hume EVI service page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Vapi integrates with — Vapi docs list Hume EVI as a provider/integration. (verified 2026-10-29)