Block, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey, unveiled Dessa, a voice AI model trained only on human speech that processes audio directly and can listen while speaking, handling interruptions, laughter and tone changes. Company demos drew amazement online, while filmmaker Justine Bateman warned the technology could help people be deceived, and Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao saw potential in children's education. Block trained Dessa from scratch on a single Nvidia GB200 NVL72 system and says it can run locally on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max chip or better. Dessa is currently a research preview offered to a small group of AI safety researchers, and Block has not disclosed the model's size, benchmark results or a public release date.
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