Block shows Dessa, a full-duplex voice model trained only on conversation audio
Block's research lab revealed Dessa, a speech-to-speech model that can listen and talk at once and was trained from scratch on recorded conversations, with no text or pretrained language model. It runs locally on a high-end Mac. It is not public yet: Block is inviting safety researchers to test it and has opened a waitlist.
Why it matters
A speech-native model with no text backbone challenges the usual speech-to-text, LLM, text-to-speech chain for voice agents.