Hume launches new text-to-speech model Octave that generates custom AI voices with adjustable emotions

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More New York City startup Hume AI emerged from stealth two years ago and has since raised multimillions in funding on the basis of its technology that creatives emotive AI voices for use in enterprise applications. Today, it is taking its offerings a step further with a new large-language and speech model called the “Omni-capable text and voice engine,” or Octave for short, designed to produce lifelike, emotionally nuanced speech for use across different forms of content, from audiobooks to prerecorded video game character dialog and film/TV/video. Hume claims Octave the first text-to-speech system powered by a large language model (LLM) trained not only on text but on speech and emotion tokens, enabling it to understand words in context and adjust tone, rhythm, and cadence accordingly — and which the user can adjust on the sentence-level with text prompts. “We ... Read full article.