Telenow
Text-to-speech (TTS)BYOK supported

Hume (Octave) for AI voice agents

Hume (Octave) is one of the voices you can run a Telenow AI voice agent on. Expressive, emotional TTS. Higher latency — warmth over speed. Give your agent a Hume (Octave) voice for natural, streaming speech the caller can't tell from a human. Mix and match it with any LLM, STT, TTS and carrier — Telenow is component-level, so you're never locked in.

Last updated 2026-09-16

Hume (Octave) voices

Non-streaming~700ms46 voices
Auto (Octave generates)Colton Rivers · ENGLISHDungeon Master · ENGLISHFemale Meditation Guide · ENGLISHFriendly Troll · ENGLISHGeraldine Wallace · ENGLISHGhost With Unfinished Business · ENGLISHImani Carter · ENGLISHLady Elizabeth · ENGLISHMale Protagonist · ENGLISHMedieval Peasant Woman · ENGLISHMedieval Town Crier · ENGLISHMrs. Pembroke · ENGLISHSpanish Instructor · SPANISHDaniela · SPANISHEmma · SPANISHIsabella · SPANISHJuan · SPANISHAkira · JAPANESEFumiko · JAPANESEAiko · JAPANESEKen · JAPANESEKana · JAPANESEPriya · HINDISuresh · HINDIArjun · HINDIMika the Musician · FRENCHBenjamin · FRENCHMarie Lafleur · FRENCHAnna · GERMANLeon · GERMANBianca · GERMANMarco il Consulente · ITALIANChiara · ITALIANSofia · ITALIANSoo-Jin · KOREANJin-Hee · KOREANJae-Hyun the Director · KOREANA Voz do Silêncio · PORTUGUESEA Viajante de Alma · PORTUGUESE

Frequently asked questions

Can I use a Hume (Octave) voice for my AI agent?+

Yes — pick a Hume (Octave) voice in Telenow and your agent speaks with it on every call, streaming so there's no awkward pause.

What voices does Hume (Octave) offer?+

Auto (Octave generates), Colton Rivers, Dungeon Master, Female Meditation Guide, Friendly Troll, Geraldine Wallace, Ghost With Unfinished Business, and Imani Carter, and more — choose by language, gender and style in the builder.

Does Hume (Octave) stream speech in real time?+

Hume (Octave) generates the reply, then the agent speaks it.

How much does Hume (Octave) cost for a voice agent?+

You pay Hume (Octave)'s usage at cost plus Telenow's transparent platform fee — billed per component (speech, model, telephony) and per minute, with new accounts getting free signup credit to try it.

Can I bring my own Hume (Octave) API key?+

Yes. Telenow supports BYOK — paste your own Hume (Octave) key to bill Hume (Octave) usage to your account, or use the platform key and pay through Telenow.

Other text-to-speech (tts) options

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ElevenLabs
Most natural prosody; great for branded voices.
OpenAI TTS
Predictable cost, 6 stock voices.
Cartesia
Lowest-latency streaming TTS (Sonic); near-realtime, μ-law 8k direct.
xAI (Grok)
Grok streaming TTS — expressive voices + your xAI voice clones, speech tags (laugh, sigh, pause) when expression is on; μ-law 8k telephony, 24k HD on web calls.
Soniox
Soniox real-time TTS — 60+ languages with one voice speaking them all (strong Hindi + code-switching), plus instant cross-lingual voice cloning; μ-law 8k telephony, 24k HD on web, gapless streaming.
Amazon Polly
AWS Polly neural voices — cheap, many languages, μ-law telephony output.
LMNT (Aurora)
Real-time multilingual TTS — low latency, 30+ languages, low cost.
Rime
Conversational US-English with accents/dialects; sub-100ms.
Sarvam (Indian languages)
Bulbul — Hindi + 10 Indian languages & Indian-English accents.
Smallest.ai (Lightning)
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UnrealSpeech
Low-cost streaming TTS — Kokoro voices across English (US/UK) & Hindi.
Google Gemini TTS
Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS — 30 voices that each speak 90+ languages, directed in plain English: you write the speaker, the scene and the accent (Indian, American, British…) and the same voice performs it. Inline tags ([whispers], [laughs], [excited]) steer delivery mid-sentence when expression is on. Synthesised a whole turn at a time so the performance never drifts between clauses; μ-law 8k telephony, 24k HD on web.
Custom TTS (bring your own endpoint)
Point at any streaming-HTTP TTS endpoint. Describe the request body + audio format once; we reframe the audio to telephony μ-law. MVP: streaming HTTP (mulaw / pcm16 / mp3).
$1.00 free credit on signup

Build a voice agent with Hume (Octave)

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