Block releases pure speech dialogue model Dessa

Jack Dorsey’s Block announced an AI model called Dessa that’s trained “from scratch on nothing but human conversation,” and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny.

Take this one , for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between the model and the speaker does have a mostly natural back and forth (though for some reason, the model initially mistakes the speaker for somebody named “Ronaldo”).

Here’s a video of Dessa playing a guessing game over voice:

The Dessa website features a few other examples, like a back-and-forth about Christopher Nolan’s films (including Dessa going on an unexpected tangent about Bryan Singer’s Superman films), a person telling Dessa about taking it on a surprise trip to Paris (to which Dessa, as the website describes, “then answers with what sounds like teary gratitude”), and a conversation between OpenAI’s GPT-Live-1 voice model and Dessa (where Dessa comes across as more natural). You can hear clips from some of those conversations in this video .

On the website, the Dessa team says that Dessa is a “true speech-to-speech model, and everything it knows came from human speech,” and it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max “or better.” As for why they made it, the team gives the three reasons “curiosity (aka fun), better understanding between humans and AI, and safety,” and provided some more detail:

The Dessa team says it will be giving “a small group of AI safety researchers” early access to the model.