Block's new voice model sounds eerily human

Jack Dorsey's Block has released a new voice model from the company's research lab that runs locally and sounds strangely human, with expressions such as laughs, pauses and cries. The company said the model, called Dessa, is trained fully on human speech and a single NVIDIA GPU.

Dessa is a full-duplex model, meaning it can talk and listen at the same time, much like the GPT-Live model OpenAI released earlier this year. Typically, speech models are paired with a large language model for knowledge retrieval. Block said Dessa's knowledge stems from the conversational data it has.

Block said current models can sound unnatural and annoying because they have text in the pipeline that drives speech generation. Many models, such as ElevenLabs v4 or Fish Audio Drama 3, use voice tags to drive emotion in speech generation. Dorsey's company claims emotion is built into its model. It is not clear whether that emotion is steered by some kind of tags.

“Interacting with current voice AI can just plain suck. It turns your voice into text and throws away an incredible amount of information text alone can't carry. The most powerful AIs in the world can't hear how you feel. We think that's ridiculous, leads to a worse experience, and is potentially dangerous,” the company said in a blog post.

The company's researchers posted multiple examples of conversations with Dessa in which the agent had different voices, cadences and emotions. In one conversation, for instance, the bot said it was tired from work, and at that point it sounded tired.

In the example below, the bot was talking about the person making it comfortable while sounding emotional and almost breaking down.

Another shows a Block team member playing a game with the voice assistant.

The company said the model can run locally on a consumer-grade computer such as a MacBook M4 Max or better. However, there is no public access to Dessa at the moment, and Block has issued a call for safety researchers to test the model. This is likely to test cases where a voice agent could trick people on the other end.

Block is in the business of finance and selling its solutions to small businesses. Square already uses voice AI to handle ordering. But with its own voice model that can run on-device, it could power many more business and consumer experiences at a lower cost.