{"slug": "jack-dorseys-block-made-an-ai-model-that-talks-to-you-like-an-awkward-new-friend", "title": "Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend", "summary": "Block, Jack Dorsey's company, announced an AI model called Dessa that was trained \"from scratch on nothing but human conversation\" and is a \"true speech-to-speech model\" that can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max \"or better.\" Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam shared sample conversations in which the model mostly holds natural back-and-forth but initially mistakes a speaker for someone named \"Ronaldo,\" and Block's site includes a clip of OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 voice model talking with Dessa, where Dessa comes across as more natural. The Dessa team cited \"curiosity (aka fun), better understanding between humans and AI, and safety\" as its reasons for building the model, arguing today's voice AI \"flattens what we say into text and can't keep up with human timing,\" and said it will give \"a small group of AI safety researchers\" early access.", "body_md": "Jack Dorsey’s Block announced an AI model called Dessa that’s trained “from scratch on nothing but human conversation,” and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny.\n\n# Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend\n\nYou have got to listen to these conversations with Block’s new Dessa AI model.\n\nTake [this one](https://x.com/RagavanThurair/status/2113671324400861645), for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between the model and the speaker does have a mostly natural back and forth (though for some reason, the model initially mistakes the speaker for somebody named “Ronaldo”).\n\nHere’s [a video](https://x.com/RagavanThurair/status/2113704911749911028) of Dessa playing a guessing game over voice:\n\nThe [Dessa website](https://block.xyz/dessa) features a few other examples, like a back-and-forth about Christopher Nolan’s films (including Dessa going on an unexpected tangent about Bryan Singer’s *Superman* films), a person telling Dessa about taking it on a surprise trip to Paris (to which Dessa, as the website describes, “then answers with what sounds like teary gratitude”), and a conversation between OpenAI’s GPT-Live-1 voice model and Dessa (where Dessa comes across as more natural). You can hear clips from some of those conversations [in this video](https://x.com/RagavanThurair/status/2113691903866872251).\n\nOn the website, the Dessa team says that Dessa is a “true speech-to-speech model, and everything it knows came from human speech,” and it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max “or better.” As for why they made it, the team gives the three reasons “curiosity (aka fun), better understanding between humans and AI, and safety,” and provided some more detail:\n\nBabies learn to talk without ever seeing a word written down. We wanted to see if a model could too. It can. It’s just very hard.\n\nSpeech is the most natural interface to any intelligence, super or otherwise, and today’s voice AI wastes it. It flattens what we say into text and can’t keep up with human timing.\n\nAI keeps gaining power and independence, and it’s still nearly deaf to the emotion in our voices. Imagine being in serious pain while a voice AI has no idea and just keeps going. That’s the safety problem. Dessa is a step toward fixing it.\n\nThe Dessa team says it will be giving “a small group of AI safety researchers” early access to the model.\n\n**Follow topics and authors** from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jack-dorseys-block-made-an-ai-model-that-talks-to-you-like-an-awkward-new-friend", "canonical_source": "https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1017906/jack-dorsey-block-dessa-ai-voice-speech", "published_at": "2026-10-23 19:32:39+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-23 19:40:41.886562+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-safety", "large-language-models", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Block", "Jack Dorsey", "Dessa", "Ragavan Thurairatnam", "OpenAI", "GPT-Live-1", "MacBook Pro M4 Max"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jack-dorseys-block-made-an-ai-model-that-talks-to-you-like-an-awkward-new-friend", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jack-dorseys-block-made-an-ai-model-that-talks-to-you-like-an-awkward-new-friend.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jack-dorseys-block-made-an-ai-model-that-talks-to-you-like-an-awkward-new-friend.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/jack-dorseys-block-made-an-ai-model-that-talks-to-you-like-an-awkward-new-friend.jsonld"}}