About

Breaking down communication barriers.

We're an applied AI lab for voice, conversation and multimodal agents. We bring technology and the humanities together to build voices and assistants that respect how people actually speak, in Spanish and beyond.

Our story

2013
The founding team starts working together on conversational interfaces and artificial intelligence.
2017
Monoceros Labs is born to research speech and conversational technology. Our first product, Naiz.chat, gave chatbots a personality. We took part in Y Combinator Startup School.
2018
Voice assistants arrive in Spain in Spanish, and we launch our first voice apps, such as Veo Veo and Historias para Recordar, a memory exercise for people with Alzheimer's.
2019
We become a featured Amazon Alexa agency in Spain and Nieves Ábalos is recognized as an Alexa Champion. We build voice experiences with Grupo Planeta, Atresmedia, Lingokids and Mahou.
2020
With a CDTI NEOTEC project, we start researching our own Spanish speech synthesis models.
2021
We build the first generation of Fonos, with custom voices and Spanish accents such as Andalusian.
2023
The Fonos website opens to the public. Victoria, PRISA's synthetic voice for sports news, wins at the INMA Global Media Awards. RTVE Elecciones, with synthetic voices for small towns, receives the IBC Social Impact Award.
2024
With the RTVE-UGR Chair we publish research on synthetic voices for fake audio detection.
2025
Free the Voices, the first LGBTIQ+ synthetic voice bank, created with LLYC, is named one of El Mundo's 100 Best Ideas of the Year. We bring Catalan voices to RTVE's weather news.
Today
We focus on applied AI for voice, conversation and multimodal agents, while preparing a new version of Fonos and new products.

Who leads Monoceros Labs

Carlos Muñoz-Romero and Nieves Ábalos founded the lab in 2017 and personally lead every project.

Carlos Muñoz-Romero

Co-founder

Nieves Ábalos

Co-founder

A collaborative lab

For each challenge we bring together the right people and work inside your team, in short cycles.

Led by its founders

Carlos and Nieves lead every project. From the first meeting, you talk to the people who design and decide.

Specialists for each challenge

We bring in university researchers, computational linguists, experience designers, voice actors and specialists as each project requires.

Part of your team

We adapt to your tools and your pace, and the knowledge stays in your organization.

How we approach AI

Know the limits

We know where the technology fails, and we design for it instead of hiding it.

Voices with consent

We only create voices of real people with their permission, and we care about how they're used.

Against disinformation

We research how to detect fake audio and believe people should know when content is synthetic.

Diversity of speech

We want technology to understand and represent more people, accents and languages.

Why Monoceros?

Monoceros is the Unicorn constellation. Like a constellation, we connect dots, ideas and people with different backgrounds: technology and humanities, research and design. Our symbol brings together the constellation, the letter M and voice as an audio signal.

Award-winning projects

Recognition for projects we built together with our clients.

Got a voice or conversation challenge?

Tell us what you want to achieve. If we're not the right team, we'll say so.

Tell us about your project