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IT Home reported on October 25 that Block, the company led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has launched a new voice model called Dessa. It can run locally and simulate emotional expressions such as laughter, pauses, and a choked-up voice, producing highly humanlike speech. According to the company, Dessa was trained entirely on human speech data, using only 1 rack of Nvidia GPUs during training.
Dessa is a full-duplex model. Like GPT-Live, which OpenAI released earlier this year, it can listen to a user while speaking. Mainstream voice models generally need to be paired with a large language model to access knowledge; Block says Dessa draws its knowledge from the conversational data used to train it.
Block says existing voice AI experiences often feel stiff and unnatural because the generation process first converts speech into text and then uses that text to synthesize speech. Many models, including ElevenLabs v4 and Fish Audio Drama 3, rely on speech tags to control emotion. Dorsey's company claims emotional expression is built into the model itself, although it remains unclear whether the underlying system still uses some kind of tags to regulate emotion.
Block wrote in a blog post: “Voice AI interactions today are terrible. They first turn your speech into text, losing a great deal of information that text cannot convey. Even the world's most powerful AI cannot hear your emotions. We think this makes little sense: it creates a poor experience and poses potential risks.”
The research team released several sample conversations with Dessa. The agent can change its voice, speaking speed, and emotional tone. In one conversation, for example, the AI says it is exhausted from work, and its voice conveys fatigue at the same time.
In another example, the AI talks about how the other person makes it feel at ease, speaking with emotion and sounding close to choking up. Another demonstration shows Block employees playing a game with the voice assistant.
According to the company, the model can run locally on a consumer computer, with an M4 Max MacBook or a higher-spec model as the minimum hardware requirement. Dessa is not yet available for public testing. Block is inviting safety researchers to test it, with a focus on scenarios in which this type of voice agent could deceive people.
According to IT Home, Block's main business is financial services, and it provides solutions for small and micro businesses. Its Square business already uses voice AI to process orders. Having developed a voice model that can run on devices, Block may be able to roll out more voice products for merchants and consumers at a lower cost.
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