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Tom's Guide
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Tom's Guide
Voice cloning, celebrity impersonations and the need for safeguarding — Hume's CEO sounds off on the world of AI voice generation
On a Wednesday afternoon, I'm sitting on a video call listening to Ricky Gervais tell me a joke about voice cloning. Then, Audrey Heburn follows up to tell me her opinions on artificial intelligence. Unsurprisingly, neither of these people were actually on the call. Instead, it's Hume's CEO and chief scientist, Dr Alan Cowen, on the other side. He's showing off the latest update to his company's AI voice creation service EVI 3. Given just 30 seconds of audio, the tool can create a near-perfect replica of someone's voice. Not just their tone or accent, this new feature captures and replicates mannerisms and personality, too. Ricky Gervais telling me jokes about voice cloning features has his same dry wit and sarcastic tone. And Audrey Heburn is wistful and intrigued, while talking in a softer British accent of the time. But it's not just celebrities. This tool can take and replicate any voice in the world, all from just one small audio clip. Obviously, a tool like this has the benefit of changing the world, both for the better and the worse. Cowen sat down with Tom's Guide to explain this new tool, his background, and why his team wants to revolutionize the world of AI voice cloning. Hume operates in an area of AI that oddly doesn't come up as much. They are a voice generation software, making the claim of being 'the world's most realistic voice AI'. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. I think this is the fastest evolving part of the AI space. There are competitors from OpenAI and Google, but what we've done with Evi 3 is take the technology to the next step. It has come a long way over the years, now offering text-to-speech with a range of preset voices, as well as the ability to design a voice from a description. Now, with this latest update, the company can also clone any and all voices. 'I think this is the fastest evolving part of the AI space. There are competitors from OpenAI and Google, but what we've done with Evi 3 is take the technology to the next step,' Cowen explained on the call. 'Previous models have relied on mimicking specific people. Then you need loads of data to fine-tune for each person. This model instead replicates exactly what a person sounds like, including their emotions and personality.' This is achieved by using Hume's large backlog of voice data and reinforcement learning so that they don't have to mimic specific people. Give the model a 30-second clip, and it can recreate it from scratch. This allows the model to learn your specific inflections, accent and personality, while training it against a huge backlog of voice data to fill in the gaps. Of course, a model like this works best when given a good representation. A muffled clip of you talking in a monotone voice won't match your personality much. However, it currently only works for English and Spanish, with plans for more languages in the future. If, like me, your first thought at hearing all of this is concern, then surprisingly you have something in common with Cowen. 'I think this could be very misused. Early on at Hume, we were so concerned about these risks that we decided not to pursue voice cloning. But we've changed our mind because there are so many people with legitimate use cases for voice cloning that have approached us,' Cowen explained. 'The legitimate use cases include things like live translation, dubbing, making content more accessible, being able to replicate your own voice for scripts, or even celebrities who want to reach fans.' While these use cases do exist, there are just as many negative ones out there as well. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently warned of the risks of AI voice cloning and its ability to be used in scams and bank voice activations. This technology, paired with video and image generation could be the push deepfakes have needed for a while to become truly problematic. Cowen explained that he was aware of these concerns and claimed that Hume was approaching it as best as they could. 'We are releasing a lot of safeguards with this technology. We analyze every conversation ,and we're still improving in this regard. But we can score how likely it is that something is being misused on a variety of dimensions. Whether somebody is being scammed or impersonated without permission,' Cowen said. 'We can obviously shut off access when people aren't using it correctly. In our terms, you have to comply with a bunch of ethical guidelines that we introduced alongside the Hume Initiative. These concerns have been on our mind since we started, and as we continue to unroll these technologies, we are improving our safeguarding too.' The Hume Initiative is a project set up by the Hume company. It's ethos is that modern technology should, above all, serve our emotional well-being. That is somewhat vague, but the Initiative lists out six principles for empathetic technologies: Of course, while these are good guidelines to follow, they are subjective, and only beneficial when followed. Cowen assured me that these are beliefs that Hume stands by and that, when it comes to voice cloning, they are well aware of the risks. Early on at Hume, we were so concerned about these risks that we decided not to pursue voice cloning. But we've changed our mind because there are so many people with legitimate use cases for voice cloning that have approached us. 'We are at the forefront of this technology and we try to stay ahead of it. I think that there will be people that don't respect the guidelines of this kind of tool. I don't want people to walk away thinking there is no danger here, there is,' Cowen explained. 'People should be concerned about deepfakes on the phone, they should be wary of these types of scams, and it something that I think we need a cross-industry attempt to address.' Despite being aware of the risks, Cowen explained that he thought this was a technology that they had to build. 'The AI space moves so fast that I don't doubt that a bad actor in six months will have access to something like this technology. We need to be careful of that,' Cowen said. Cowen spent a lot of our chat focusing on guidelines and the legitimate concerns of this kind of technology. His background is in Psychology and strongly believes that this kind of technology will have more of a positive effect on people's wellbeing than negative. 'People have been really enjoying cloning their voices with our demo. We've had thousands of conversations already, which is remarkable. People are using it in a really fun way,' Cowen said, after discussing what he thinks people get wrong about this kind of technology. He strongly believes that it can be used for fun, to help build people's confidence and can even be used for training purposes or for voice acting needs in films as well as dubbing. Of course, just like with many other areas of AI, the positive benefits are competing with the negative. Being able to have a generic voice read a script is useful, but rather uneventful in risk. Being able to accurately recreate any voice in the world comes with a long list of concerns. For now, Cowen and his team are way ahead in this venture, and seem committed to the ethical side of the debate, but we remain early into the life of this kind of technology.
Tom's Guide
06-06-2025
- Tom's Guide
You can build your own AI voice from scratch with Hume — here's how
Hume is a chatbot which seeks to bring expressiveness, realism and emotional understanding to voice AI. It's designed to read the emotion in your voice, meaning conversations can feel more natural and personable. And now, thanks to the introduction of EVI 3 (a model that captures the full range of voices and speaking styles in one model), you can speak with any voice and personality, customizing them to suit your exact needs. You don't need to pay to play around with the system, but I would suggest signing up for an account because it gives you access to more AI features. EVI 3 requires a back-and-forth verbal conversation, but if you prefer typing, you can use the Octave text-to-speech model instead. Hume's EVI 3 is well worth trying as it's the best AI voice generator around right now, outperforming GPT-4o in blind tests across empathy, expressiveness, and audio quality. Let's check it out. Go to and you will be able to immediately make use of EVI 3, the platform's new empathic voice-to-voice model. To begin generating a natural-sounding customised voice, simply select Design a voice — but be aware that you will need to grant access to your device's microphone because the creation process is entirely verbal. Since you can't use text prompts, you may also want to be somewhere a little private and quiet. Hume's AI will start a conservation with you. It will introduce the concept of creating an AI voice and personality, and it will ask you to list the qualities that you want the voice to have. You don't need to wait for the AI to finish communicating. You can interrupt whenever you wish and, to speed things up, we advise you to do this.. So what can you say? Well, you could, for example, say: 'give me a high-pitched, laid-back sarcastic voice in a New York accent'. Hume will acknowledge this and ask some follow up questions to get an idea of the personality. Would you like the AI to be blunt and to the point? Do you have any particular situations in mind? That kind of thing. Eventually, Hume AI will stop asking questions. It will tell you that it has enough information and it's ready to generate a custom voice for you. You can also select Proceed to Customized Voice if you feel you've added enough. You'll land on the chat screen. You can engage in a conversation and get a feel for the voice and how it sounds, working out if it's what you wanted. The more you chat, the more you will know if it's reacting well. If you like the voice, click the thumbs-up symbol. If you don't like the voice, click the thumbs-down symbol. Doing the latter will give you an option to try creating the same voice again — click Retry and it will re-generate, hopefully giving you something better. When you've had enough of chatting, you can do one of two things. You can click the + icon and add the voice to your account – select Continue (if you don't have an account you will be prompted to set one up). You can also exit the chat. Just click the red button and you will return to the home screen. From there, you can select Design a new voice or select Talk to custom voice if you want to resume the conversation with the same voice. And there you go. You now know how to design your own AI voice using Hume. Other services can perform a similar task. Discover how to turn text into audio with ElevenLabs AI Reader and learn how to use Hendra to clone your voice. You may also want to explore OpenVoice, a text-to-speech AI tool that clones your voice in seconds. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.
