Jack Dorsey's Block launches Dessa, a voice AI that mimics human emotions

Block, the company founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has launched a new voice model called Dessa. It runs locally on consumer computers, needing at least a MacBook with an M4 Max chip. It can mimic laughter, pauses, and even a choked-up voice, sounding very human.

Dessa is a full-duplex model, so it can talk and listen at the same time, much like GPT-Live that OpenAI released earlier this year. It was trained only on human voice data using one rack of NVIDIA GPUs, and its knowledge comes from those conversations, so it doesn't need a separate large language model.

Block says current voice AI turns speech into text first, losing emotional cues along the way. Dessa is not open to the public yet. The company is inviting security researchers to test risks like the AI tricking people, and plans to roll out more voice products at lower cost.