Technology
Jack Dorsey's Block unveils Dessa voice AI model
The Indian Express·
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Block introduced Dessa, a full-duplex speech model. He wrote on X that it runs on a MacBook and inference is faster than real time. Block says Dessa was trained from scratch on human conversations with no text and no pretrained models. It is in research preview behind a waitlist, without API, price or weights.
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What It Means For You
- Dessa is listed as a research preview behind a waitlist, with no public API or weights yet.
- Block says the model can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better.
- Public evidence so far is limited to demos posted with the announcement.
What's Happening
- Dorsey called Dessa the most authentic full-duplex speech model and said voice is the natural interface.
- The company says the system listens and talks at the same time with no transcription layer.
- Dessa is presented as the work of a small AI research lab at Block founded by former Dessa startup members.
How Block Describes Training
- Block says Dessa learned from human speech only, studying accents, pauses, humour and turn-taking.
- The company claims training used only one NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system.
- It contrasts the approach with large language models that rely on massive text corpora.
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