Hume AI, the leading voice AI research company focused on aligning artificial intelligence with human well-being, has appointed Andrew Ettinger as its new Chief Executive Officer. The company also announced an expansion of its research partnerships, including a non-exclusive technology licensing agreement with Google and the transition of co-founder Alan Cowen to Google.
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Ettinger's appointment marks a pivotal step in Hume AI's transition to a leading provider of research infrastructure for voice and emotion in AI. His experience scaling high-impact data and AI operations positions him to drive Hume's growth as demand surges for emotionally intelligent voice interfaces.
"Voice in AI is evolving from a feature to the primary interface for the next generation of applications and devices," said Ettinger. "Understanding emotion will be essential to unlocking AI's full potential and that will require ongoing systems that incorporate human-in-the-loop feedback. That's where Hume's data, annotation, and reinforcement-learning infrastructure is setting the pace for the industry."
The non-exclusive licensing deal with Google, combined with Cowen's move, underscores the strategic value of Hume's emotionally grounded technologies in advancing frontier AI development.
"Hume's infrastructure—built around emotionally grounded data, evaluation, and reinforcement learning—is exactly what frontier labs and enterprises need as voice becomes the primary interface for AI," said Cowen. "Having spent time getting to know Andrew, I'm confident that he is the right leader to take Hume to the next level as the leading research infrastructure provider for voice and emotion."
Hume continues to expand its research platform, serving partners with advanced tools for voice evaluation, data annotation, post-training workflows, and reinforcement learning environments that train models to exhibit greater realism and empathy. The company plans to release updated text-to-speech and speech-to-speech models in the coming weeks.
"What has always distinguished Hume is the strength of its AI research foundation in voice, paired with the capabilities to build and deploy speech language models at scale," said John Beadle, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Aegis Ventures, and lead investor of Hume AI. "As the company has matured, it has become clear that the same infrastructure built to power our own frontier models can serve a much broader set of customers across the industry building cutting-edge voice models, particularly major AI research labs. Andrew has a rare track record of translating research-grade capabilities into durable, category-defining businesses, which makes him uniquely positioned to lead Hume's next chapter."
This leadership transition and partnership expansion position Hume AI to capitalize on the growing need for voice AI that prioritizes emotional understanding and human alignment.
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