Hume AI Alternatives After the TTS and EVI Sunset (2026)
Hume is sunsetting its TTS (Octave) and Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) APIs. Access ends November 13, 2026 at 12:01 a.m. EST, and Hume says account data is permanently deleted after that date (Hume developer docs). Octave needs a TTS API; EVI needs speech-to-speech or an agent stack. Prices below are from each vendor's own pricing page.
Verified replacements for Hume Octave TTS and EVI: ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Rime, OpenAI Realtime and Gemini Live.
| Tool | Starting price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Agents: $0.08 per minute | Builders who want ElevenLabs' voices and speech models in one agent pipeline | |
| Free; paid from $5/mo | Fast, low-latency text-to-speech | |
| From $0.03 per 1K characters (~$0.03/min) | Natural-sounding TTS for phone agents | |
| gpt-realtime-2.1-mini: audio $10 in / $20 out per 1M tokens | Developers building speech-to-speech voice agents directly on OpenAI models | |
| Free tier; paid audio ~$0.005/min in, ~$0.018/min out (Gemini 3.8 Live) | Developers who want a low-latency speech-to-speech model from Google |
Prices from vendors' official pricing pages, checked October 14, 2026. Not sponsored; order isn't a ranking. Hume sunset date from Hume's own developer docs.