Empathic Voice Interface | Sample Implementation

Jumpstart your development with Hume's Empathic Voice Interface!

Overview

This project is not yet ready for general access. This project will be set up for use by our general audience with the release of EVI this month! If you would like to be notified when EVI is release, please sign up for our waitlist here.

This project features a sample implementation of Hume's Empathic Voice Interface using Hume's Typescript SDK.

Prerequisites

To run this project locally, ensure your development environment meets the following requirements:

• Node.js (v18.0.0 or higher)
• pnpm (v8.0.0 or higher)

To check the versions of pnpm and Node.js installed on a Mac via the terminal, you can use the following commands:

1. For Node.js, enter the following command and press Enter:

node -v

This command will display the version of Node.js currently installed on your system, for example, v21.6.1.

2. For pnpm, type the following command and press Enter:

pnpm -v

This command will show the version of pnpm that is installed, like 8.10.0.

If you haven't installed these tools yet, running these commands will result in a message indicating that the command was not found. In that case, you would need to install them first. Node.js can be installed from its official website or via a package manager like Homebrew, and pnpm can be installed via npm (which comes with Node.js) by running npm install -g pnpm in the terminal.

Next you'll need to set your environment variables necessary for authentication. You'll need your API key and client secret which are accessible from the portal. See our documentation on getting your api keys.

After obtaining your API keys, you need to set them as environment variables. A quick way to do this is to run the following commands, however the variables will be lost when the terminal window is closed or the computer is rebooted.

Note the VITE prefix to the environment variables. This prefix is required for vite to expose the environment variable to the client. For more information, see the vite documentation on environment variables and modes.

export VITE_HUME_API_KEY=<YOUR_API_KEY>
export VITE_HUME_CLIENT_SECRET=<YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET>

You can make these environment variables persistent by adding them to the .env file in the root folder of the repo, which currently exists with placeholders. Once the API secrets have been added to the file, they will persist there and you do not have to set them as environment variables going forward. The .env file is listed in the .gitignore of the repository, so there is no risk of accidentally committing these secrets to a public repository.

Serve project

Below are the steps to run the project locally:

1. Run pnpm i to install required dependencies.
2. Run pnpm build to build the project.
3. Run pnpm dev to serve the project at localhost:5173.

Usage

This implementation of Hume's Empathic User Interface (EVI) is minimal, using default configurations for the interface and a basic UI to authenticate, connect to, and disconnect from the interface.

1. Click the Authenticate button to fetch your access token. This step is neccessary to establish an authenticated connection with the interface.
2. Click the Start button to establish an authenticated connection and to begin capturing audio.
3. Upon clicking start, you will be prompted for permissions to use your microphone. Grant the permission to the application to continue.
4. Once permission is granted, you can begin speaking with the interface. The transcript of the conversation will be displayed on the webpage in realtime.
5. Click Disconnect when finished speaking with the interface to stop audio capture and to disconnect the Web Socket.