Hume AI, a startup and research centre that develops artificial intelligence optimised for human well-being secures $50million in series B round funding.
Lead investors in the round were EQT Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, Metaplanet, Northwell Holdings, and LG Technology Ventures.
The money will go towards the company’s ongoing development of a speech interface that is emotionally intelligent and can be integrated into any kind of application.
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Hume AI was founded by Dr. Alan Cowen, a scientist and former Google employee who is credited with developing semantic space theory. Hume AI has produced a sophisticated toolkit of APIs for measuring human emotional expression, which is currently being utilised in a variety of industries, including robotics, customer service, healthcare, wellness, and user research.
Hume AI has made available a beta version of their main product, an Empathic Voice Interface (EVI), in conjunction with the fundraising effort. Using data from millions of human interactions, the emotionally intelligent conversational AI is trained to recognise when users are done speaking, anticipate their preferences, and eventually produce vocal responses that are optimised for user happiness.
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About Hume AI
Hume wants to pave the way for a time when technology will better support human objectives by using a knowledge of human emotion. The company’s objective includes conducting innovative scientific research that is published in prestigious scientific publications and supporting The Hume Initiative, a non-profit that has produced the first practical ethical standards for AI with empathy.
