InteractionLabs (Ongo) and Gradium Partner to Redefine Human-Robot Interaction

We're excited to announce a partnership between Gradium and InteractionLabs. Starting today, Ongo will be powered by Gradium's voices, Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech.

Why voice matters for robots

Before robots can be useful in the home, they must first be welcome in the home. Most robots today feel mechanical. They move, they respond, they execute tasks. But they don't connect. The missing ingredient isn't better hardware or smarter algorithms. It's personality. And personality starts with the voice.

Voice is the most immediate signal of intent, warmth, and character. It shapes whether an interaction feels like a transaction or a conversation. For a robot designed around emotional presence rather than pure utility, voice is where it all comes together.

What InteractionLabs is building

InteractionLabs takes a fundamentally different approach to robotics. Where the industry obsesses over capabilities, InteractionLabs is building the first robots with a soul. Ongo is designed by a team that includes Alec Sokolow, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Toy Story, as Creative Director, because building a robot people actually want in their home is as much a storytelling challenge as an engineering one.

The approach is working. Millions of organic views and a passionate community of early supporters, all with zero advertising spend.

What Gradium is building

Gradium builds foundational audio language models: an audio-native family of models that unify generation, transcription, transformation and dialogue into a single neural architecture. Our models deliver ultra-realistic, emotionally expressive speech with low latency, while remaining scalable so high-quality voice is widely available. Our Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Text are already supporting customers and various use cases in production.

Voice will become the main interface between humans and machines. What it takes to get there is to break the technical limitations that make voice AI more brittle, less resilient and less natural than human voice. Gradium is bridging this gap.

This is only the beginning

Integrating Gradium's voices into Ongo is the first step of a deeper collaboration. We are actively working together on transformational features that have never been seen in a consumer robot, capabilities that will make the interaction between humans and robots feel genuinely natural and intuitive.

What's coming will fundamentally change what people expect from a robot in their home.

More to announce soon. Stay tuned.