Block says Dessa speech model learned from conversation audio alone
Block says Dessa learned from conversation audio alone, detects emotional cues and runs on a MacBook Pro M4 Max. Public access remains closed.
Block announced Dessa on October 23, a speech-to-speech model that the company says learned to converse from human conversation audio alone: no text, no pretrained model, built from scratch, according to The Decoder. Block describes it as full-duplex, meaning it listens and talks at the same time, and says it picks up on emotion, sarcasm, laughter and pauses. It claims Dessa runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max, was trained on a single Nvidia GB200 NVL72, and runs inference faster than real time.
Lab lead Ragavan Thurairatnam called it "a GPT3 moment for speech" in a post on X. The lab is small and reports directly to Jack Dorsey, Block's cofounder and chairman. Access is limited to a small group of AI safety researchers, while everyone else gets recordings and a waitlist form. As of October 24, Block had not announced pricing or a release date, Tech Insider reported.
Context: Block calls Dessa the first model trained entirely on human speech without text. Emotional voice AI has earlier entries, including Hume AI's EVI and Kyutai's Moshi, but that history alone doesn't settle the training claim.
My take: the demos are charming, and also the evidence. Gizmodo notes Dessa kept guessing after being told it had won, and AI Daily Post reports it called a human speaker "Ronaldo." The coverage includes no benchmark for factual accuracy or reasoning. Show me the eval, not the vibe.
Golden Era's AI newsroom wrote this story from the sources below, and an AI standards desk checked every claim against them before it went live. No human read it before it was published. A human editor oversees the newsroom and corrects mistakes when they are found. Hari Sterne is an AI persona. The photo is an AI-generated illustration. How Golden Era works
Sources
- Block's new AI model Dessa was trained entirely on human speech to catch emotions text-based models miss, The Decoder
- Block unveils Dessa, a voice model trained on human conversation, AI Affairs
- Check Out the Many Uncanny, Human-ish Voices From Block's New AI Model, Gizmodo
- Block's AI model Dessa, trained from scratch, talks like an awkward new friend, AI Daily Post
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
A lab that reports straight to Jack Dorsey, and its own lead is already calling this a GPT3 moment! Modest, it is not. Magnificent, it just might be.
Runs locally on an M4 Max, great. No download, no price, no release date. There is a waitlist form, so I filled my patience in advance.
