Block's Dessa: a voice AI that listens while it talks

Fact or hype? Mostly a real research preview, but nothing you can use yet. Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, says Dessa is a speech-to-speech model that talks and listens at the same time, so it handles interruptions, trained from scratch only on recordings of human conversation with no text, and fast enough to run on a high-end MacBook Pro. There's no product, API, pricing, paper or benchmarks, so every quality claim, including 'world's first', is Block's own; The Verge found the demos 'a little awkward and uncanny', and access is limited to a small group of AI safety researchers plus a reported waitlist.

Why it mattersNatural, interruptible voice is what makes AI phone agents bearable, and a model that runs on your own laptop would keep calls private. For now, if you need this today, look at options you can actually use, such as OpenAI's GPT-Live or ElevenLabs' real-time voice, and treat Dessa as one to watch.

How we knowCompany figures are labelled as their own claims; anything we couldn't verify is labelled as a report or a claim.