Google DeepMind is hiring the CEO and several top engineers from Hume AI, a startup working on emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, as part of a new licensing agreement, WIRED has learned.

Financial details of the deal are confidential, but Hume AI says the company will continue to supply its technology to other frontier AI labs.

The deal is the latest sign that AI companies expect voice mode to become an increasingly important interface for interacting with customers—and that understanding a user’s emotions and mood based on their voice interactions is key.

Hume AI expects to bring in $100 million in revenue in 2026 as it works with AI labs on tuning AI models to be more capable and useful voice helpers, says John Beadle, cofounder and managing partner of AEGIS Ventures, which invested in Hume AI. So far, the company has raised $74 million in funding.

CEO Alan Cowen, who has a PhD in psychology, will join Google DeepMind along with roughly seven other engineers. Cowen and the other Hume AI recruits will help Google DeepMind integrate voice and emotional intelligence into its latest models, according to sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they aren’t authorized to speak publicly about the deal.

Hume AI has invested millions in developing models and tools to hone realistic voice interfaces and to detect emotions in the voices of users. The company trains its models by having experts annotate emotional cues in real conversations. At Google, Cowen and his colleagues will help the tech giant integrate voice and emotion technology into its frontier models, sources say.

“Voice is going to become a primary interface for AI, that is absolutely where it's headed,” says Andrew Ettinger, an experienced investor and executive who is taking over as the CEO of Hume AI. Ettinger says the company will be releasing its latest models in the coming months.

Beadle, of AEGIS Ventures, says AI models that can detect a user’s emotions and adapt accordingly will become increasingly valuable, not only for consumer devices but also in customer support. “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,” Beadle says.

The Hume AI deal could position Google to compete even more aggressively with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which already features a lifelike voice mode. Google also recently partnered with Apple as part of a multiyear agreement that will see Google Gemini power a new version of Siri.

The Hume AI deal is the latest arrangement that blurs the line between a partnership and a conventional acquisition. Such arrangements allow big tech companies to extract high-value talent without the government oversight that comes with a traditional acquisition—though the Federal Trade Commission recently said it will begin scrutinizing so-called “aqui-hires.”

In 2024, Google DeepMind reportedly paid $3 billion to license technology from Character.ai, a company working on lifelike chatbot companions. Similar deals have seen Microsoft hire top talent from Inflection; Amazon recruit the team behind Adept; and Meta snag the CEO of Scale AI.