Google’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) DeepMind unit has signed a licensing deal with artificial intelligence voice startup Hume AI, Wired reported.
In addition, DeepMind is hiring Hume AI’s CEO Alan Cowen and a number of the company’s top engineers, the news outlet added.
Terms of the deal for Hume AI’s technology were not disclosed, however Hume AI said it will continue to supply other companies with its technology.
On Wednesday, Hume AI published a blog post to that fact, and highlighted the fact it only focuses on voice and emotion. “Our infrastructure scales, with a proprietary query system that searches across emotional, acoustic, and contextual dimensions,” Hume AI wrote. “Teams can choose fully human-labeled data, or automated pipelines that reach up to 95% accuracy on their own, with human verification layered on to finalize results—increasing speed and reducing full manual overhead. As an independent research partner, Hume works with frontier labs and enterprises to help them move faster by supplying the parts of voice systems that are hardest to do well internally.”
Wired added that Hume AI is on track to generate $100M in revenue in 2026, and the company has raised $74M in funding.
Shares of Google parent Alphabet rose 1.9% in premarket trading on Thursday.