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Block unveils speech-only conversational model Dessa

Block’s research team unveiled Dessa, a full-duplex speech-to-speech model trained on human conversation without text or a pretrained language model. Block says it can listen and talk simultaneously and run locally on a sufficiently powerful MacBook Pro. Public clips demonstrate the research, while early model access is limited to a small group of AI safety researchers.

Block

Dessa

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Primary source · Block · October 23, 2026

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