Block previews Dessa, a full-duplex speech-to-speech model

Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, introduced a research preview of Dessa, which it calls "the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built". Jack Dorsey's announcement says that talking with it feels like talking with a person, with emotion, nuance, pauses and natural cadence.

Block's own claims:

• Dessa is a speech-to-speech model trained from scratch only on human speech, with no text and no pretrained model.
• It was trained on a single GB200 NVL72 system.
• It runs faster than real time locally on an M4 Max.
• Early access is offered to safety researchers.

The post had about 2,000 likes by the afternoon of October 23. No independent evaluations are available yet.