Block releases full-duplex speech model Dessa
Block's internal AI research lab released the full-duplex speech-to-speech model Dessa on October 23. According to Unite.AI, the model was trained entirely from scratch on human conversational speech, can listen and speak simultaneously, and natively perceives emotion, sarcasm, and laughter; its inference is faster than real time and it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or higher configuration, with the team completing training on a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72. Block has released demo recordings and a public waitlist, and has opened early access to a small number of AI safety researchers. Other reports note that the model does not rely on a text intermediary and supports full-duplex conversation with the ability to interrupt and interject at any time, and that training consumes hundreds of times fewer tokens than large language models, but the author points out that this is currently only a small-scale research preview from Block's internal lab, the demos were selected by the company, and questions remain about how pure audio models perform on complex multi-step logical reasoning.
sarcasm, and laughter; its inference is faster than real time and it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or higher configuration, with the team completing training on a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72. Block has released demo recordings and a public waitlist, and has opened early access to a small number of AI safety researchers. Other reports note that the model does not rely on a text intermediary and supports full-duplex conversation with the ability to interrupt and interject at any time, and
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