Google DeepMind employs a CEO and some of the company’s top engineers Hume A.Istartup working on emotionally knowledgeable voice interfaces is under a novel licensing agreement, WIRED has learned.
Financial details of the deal are confidential, but Hume AI says the company will continue to provide its technology to other pioneering artificial intelligence labs.
The deal is the latest sign that AI companies expect voice to become an increasingly critical interface for interacting with customers, and that understanding a user’s emotions and mood based on their voice interactions is crucial.
Hume AI expects to reach $100 million in revenue in 2026 by working with AI labs to fine-tune AI models to be more capable and useful voice assistants, says John Beadle, co-founder and managing partner of AEGIS Ventures, which invested in Hume AI. To date, the company has raised $74 million in funding.
CEO Alan Cowen, who has a PhD in psychology, will join Google DeepMind along with about seven other engineers. Cowen and other Hume AI recruits will assist Google DeepMind integrate voice and emotional intelligence into its latest models, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the deal.
Hume AI has invested millions in developing models and tools that improve realistic voice interfaces and detect emotions in users’ voices. The company trains its models by asking experts to record emotional cues in real conversations. At Google, sources say Cowen and his colleagues will assist the tech giant integrate voice and emotion technology into its pioneering models.
“Voice will become the primary interface for artificial intelligence, and that’s exactly where it’s headed,” says Andrew Ettinger, a seasoned investor and executive who takes over as CEO of Hume AI. Ettinger says the company will release its newest models in the coming months.
AEGIS Ventures’ Beadle says artificial intelligence models that can detect user emotions and adapt accordingly will become increasingly valuable not only in consumer devices but also in customer service. “In terms of intelligence, AI models are pretty good at this stage, but in terms of overall usefulness – whether they understand your emotions and whether they can respond in a way that achieves whatever goal you’re aiming for – we think there’s a huge opportunity for improvement,” Beadle says.
The deal with Hume AI could see Google compete even more aggressively with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which already offers a realistic voice mode. Google too lately started cooperation with Apple as part of a multi-year agreement under which Google Gemini will support the novel version of Siri.
The Hume AI deal is the latest agreement that blurs the line between a partnership and a conventional acquisition. Such arrangements allow enormous tech companies to extract high-value talent without the government oversight that comes with a time-honored acquisition – although the Federal Trade Commission he recently said will start checking the so-called “aqui-tenants”.
In 2024, Google DeepMind reportedly paid $3 billion to license the technology of Character.ai, a company working on realistic companion chatbots. Through similar deals, Microsoft has hired top talent from Inflection; Amazon is recruiting the team behind Adept; and Meta capture the CEO of Scale AI.