Block (Dessa research lab) · Speech-only conversation model

Dessa

Moved from Week 44. Dessa is a full-duplex speech-to-speech conversation model from a very small AI research lab at Block, founded by former members of the Toronto deep learning startup Dessa. It was trained from scratch only on human conversation audio, with no text and no pretrained models, and it listens and talks at the same time, including laughter, interruptions and backchannels. Block says it learned language from hundreds of times fewer words than LLMs, was trained on a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, runs faster than real time and runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better. The page offers recorded demo conversations, including two with a third-party model, GPT-Live-1, but publishes no benchmarks. Access is via a waitlist, and a small group of AI safety researchers can apply for early access.