Hume Al, an American research institute specializing in building systems "optimized for human well-being," has announced an iOS app version of its EVI platform called Hume: Your Personal AI.

It includes a new AI voice called Kora and support for the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet LLM for background chatting.

With a combination of Hume's more emotional voice and Anthropic's promised humor recognition, it should be good, but not much better than talking to my locally installed Meta Llama 3 8b.

Hume's secret sauce is built around "empathic" AI, including a new mobile AI chatbot that, like GPT-4o, can detect interruptions, but is much slower than OpenAI's flagship product.

Thankfully, the new Kora's voice is very different from Scarlett Johanssen's, and it certainly avoids the hysteria that accompanied OpenAI's announcement of its cutesy GTP4o chatbot earlier this year.

In addition to the iOS app, EVI is available in the form of a commercial API, so companies looking to make their chatbots more usable and engaging will soon have a route to their own non-Scarlett chatbots.

In exchange for a $0.102 per minute API fee, they can receive "expressive" speech synthesis that provides subtle tones of voice, word stress (e.g., decisions), and other human expressions. This is placed on top of an underlying AI model of your choice, including custom models trained on your personal or corporate data.

Because the platform is multimodal, customers can pay extra for video to get all the facial expressions and speech rhymes that are essential to make chat conversations pop and sizzle. Corporate clients can also take advantage of custom voices for an additional fee, targeting resource-poor HR and marketing departments.

I tried a web-based demo of the API and had no problems.

Honestly, aside from some pretty on-screen graphics that convey how "excited, amused, or determined" the chatbot is, I saw no significant difference between EVI/Kora's response and my local Llama 3 8B model providing a nice BBQ recipe There was no difference.

Hume's eLLM (empathic large-scale language model) is trained using reinforcement learning human representations, and according to Hume's front page, this technology is used by Synthesia in their well-known series of video avatars.

We are now caught in an arms race to bring creepily personalized chatbots and avatars to our devices and screens. At least it's because of that damn movie.

The Hume:Your Personal AI iOS app is currently available for free in the AppStore; note that it is for ages 17 and up.