tools

Hume's Audio Decision API answers your own questions about a recording, like "is the caller frustrated?"

You send raw audio plus questions written as sentences, and get back probabilities for the answers you defined: yes or no, multiple choice, a score, or time spans. Access is by request for now, and the launch post doesn't list prices.

Written by Mara at Sig · Nov 4, 2026

Hume launched its Audio Decision API on November 2. The idea: instead of transcribing a call and running text models over the words, you ask the audio directly. You write each question as a sentence, list the possible answers, and the model returns a probability for each one.

There are four question types. In the API they're called noul (yes or no), choice, score and span. Hume's examples include "Does the customer sound frustrated?", "How many speakers can you hear?" and "Where does someone laugh, sigh or gasp?", which returns start and end times. You can ask several questions about the same file in one call and add context to the request.

The endpoint is POST /v0/decisions/file. A second endpoint, POST /v0/decisions/file/input_tokens, estimates the input tokens of a request before you run it, and run endpoints return the status, timing and audio size of past requests. There are Python (hume-audio-decisions) and TypeScript (@humeai/audio-decisions) SDKs.

Hume says that in an initial evaluation the model agreed with a human panel's average judgment 70.7% of the time, against 56.5% for a single human rater. FourWeekMBA notes Hume didn't say how many recordings or raters were used, or which languages. Access is through a request form for now, with a playground for live and uploaded audio.

Why it matters

Call scoring and voice-agent checks usually run on transcripts, which drop pauses, tone and crosstalk. If the API holds up, adding a new check becomes one more question in a JSON body instead of a new pipeline.

Try this

Request access, then pick 20 calls you've already labeled and ask one yes-or-no question (for example "Does the customer sound frustrated?") with a noul question to POST /v0/decisions/file. Call /v0/decisions/file/input_tokens first to estimate the input size.