Hume TTS integration guide

Overview

Hume provides a text-to-speech service that understands emotional expressions. You can use the Hume TTS plugin for LiveKit Agents to create lifelike and emotional voice AI apps.

Quick reference

This section includes a brief overview of the Hume TTS plugin. For more information, see Additional resources.

Installation

Install the plugin from PyPI:

pip install "livekit-agents[hume]~=1.0"

Authentication

The Hume plugin requires a Hume API key.

Set HUME_API_KEY in your .env file.

Usage

Use Hume TTS within an AgentSession or as a standalone speech generator. For example, you can use this TTS in the Voice AI quickstart.

from livekit.plugins import hume

session = AgentSession(
   tts=hume.TTS(
      voice=hume.VoiceByName(name="Colton Rivers", provider=hume.VoiceProvider.hume),
      description="The voice exudes calm, serene, and peaceful qualities, like a gentle stream flowing through a quiet forest.",
   )
   # ... llm, stt, etc.
)

Parameters

This section describes some of the available parameters. See the plugin reference for a complete list of all available parameters.

voiceVoiceByName | VoiceByIdOptional

The voice, specified by name or id, to be used. When no voice is specified, a novel voice will be generated based on the text and optionally provided description.

descriptionstringOptional

Natural language instructions describing how the synthesized speech should sound, including but not limited to tone, intonation, pacing, and accent. If a Voice is specified in the request, this description serves as acting instructions. If no Voice is specified, a new voice is generated based on this description.

speedfloatOptionalDefault: 1.0

Adjusts the relative speaking rate on a non-linear scale from 0.25 (much slower) to 3.0 (much faster), where 1.0 represents normal speaking pace.

instant_modeboolOptionalDefault: true

Enables ultra-low latency streaming, reducing time to first chunk. Recommended for real-time applications. Only for streaming endpoints. With this enabled, requests incur 10% higher cost.

Instant mode is automatically disabled when a voice is specified in the request.

Updating utterance options

To change the values during the session, use the update_options method. It accepts the same parameters as the TTS constructor. The new values take effect on the next utterance:

session.tts.update_options(
   voice=hume.VoiceByName(name="Colton Rivers", provider=hume.VoiceProvider.hume),
   description="The voice exudes calm, serene, and peaceful qualities, like a gentle stream flowing through a quiet forest.",
   speed=2,
)

Additional resources

The following resources provide more information about using Hume with LiveKit Agents.

Python package

The livekit-plugins-hume package on PyPI.

Plugin reference

Reference for the Hume TTS plugin.

Hume docs

Hume docs.

Voice AI quickstart

Get started with LiveKit Agents and Hume TTS.