Starcast Join the waitlist
The Neuron: AI Explained

The Neuron: AI Explained

How Hume AI Is Teaching Voice Systems to Understand More Than Words

Sep 30, 2026 · 59m

Coming soon to iPhone. Already have it? “Listen in Starcast” takes you straight there.

On this episode

About this episode

AI voices can already sound startlingly human. The harder problem is whether they actually understand how humans speak. Andrew Ettinger, CEO of Hume AI, joins Corey Noles and Grant Harvey to explain why voice AI still has a “listening problem.” A transcript can capture the words someone says while stripping away tone, hesitation, frustration, background noise, dialect, speaker identity, and the other signals that shape what those words actually mean. The conversation explores how Hume evaluates voice systems against real-world conditions, why emotion is better understood as a high-dimensional spectrum than a handful of neat labels, what breaks during long-running voice interactions, how…