Google Recruits Hume CEO Alan Cowen to Bolster Voice AI Efforts

Google DeepMind inked a licensing agreement with voice artificial intelligence startup Hume AI, Wired reported Thursday (Jan. 22).

As part of the deal, DeepMind will hire Hume CEO Alan Cowen and several of the company’s top engineers, the report said.

The deal is the latest indication that AI companies like DeepMind think voice mode will become key in interacting with consumers, according to the report. An important part of these interactions is the ability for AI to understand a user’s emotions and mood based on their voice.

Enter Hume, which develops models and tools to craft realistic voice interfaces and detect users’ emotions through their voices, training its models by having experts annotate emotional cues in actual conversations, the report said.

Cowen and his colleagues will help Google weave voice and emotion technology into its frontier models, according to the report, which cited unnamed sources.

“Voice is going to become a primary interface for AI, that is absolutely where it’s headed,” said Andrew Ettinger, an investor and executive who is taking over as Hume AI’s CEO, per the report.

Hume AI expects to bring in $100 million in revenue this year as it works on transforming AI models into better voice helpers, said John Beadle, co-founder and managing partner of AEGIS Ventures, which invested in the startup, according to the report.

AI models that can recognize a user’s emotions and adjust accordingly will become increasingly valuable for consumer devices and customer support, he said, per the report.

“On the intelligence side, AI models are quite good at this point, but from the dimension of general helpfulness—do they understand your emotion, and can they respond in a way that enables you to achieve whatever goal you’re driving towards—we think there’s a huge amount of opportunity for improvement,” he said, according to the report.

In a column about voice AI, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster said 2026 will be the year in which the technology “will finally pull agentic commerce onto the mobile phone by turning complex, desktop-only ‘go-do-this-for-me’ prompts into natural, spoken conversations that consumers can have anywhere.”

Successful platforms will “embed capable voice agents deeply into devices, apps and operating systems,” not just “bolt AI onto legacy assistants,” Webster said.

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