The sum of fifty million dollars in Series B financing was raised by Hume AI, a renewed enterprise with a study center located in New York City that develops artificial intelligence specialized for the benefit of humans.
Lead investors in the funding round were EQT Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, Metaplanet, Northwell Holdings, and LG Technology Ventures.
The funds collected will go toward the organization’s ongoing research and development of a speech interface sensitive to emotions, which can be implemented in any program.
Hume AI was established by Dr Alan Cowen, an artificial intelligence researcher and earlier Google employee credited with developing semantic space theory. Hume AI has produced a sophisticated toolbox of APIs to measure human beings’ expressions of emotions, which is currently being utilized in various business sectors, including robotics, consumer service, medical services, well-being, and consumer research.
Hume AI has made available a beta version of the company’s primary offering, an Empathic Voice Interface (EVI), to accompany the fundraising effort. Using information gathered from thousands of actual human communications, the emotionally capable artificial intelligence for conversation develops the ability to recognize once the user stops speaking, anticipate their tastes, and eventually produce optimal speech responses for their happiness. Developers can include these features in any software using only a few lines of code.
