Block unveils Dessa, a voice SI model trained only on live conversations that answers in speech with no intermediate text
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Block showed a voice model that learns only from conversations and runs on a laptop, but it cannot be tested yet.
Block's research lab (the company of Jack Dorsey) announced Dessa on October 23, a speech-to-speech model trained, the company says, from scratch on human conversation alone. According to Unite.AI, it is full-duplex: it listens and talks at the same time and decides for itself when to cut in or show it is listening. Block says the model hears and conveys emotion, laughter and sarcasm, runs faster than real time and runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better; lab lead Ragavan Thurairatnam called the release "a GPT-3 moment for speech." The model is not yet widely available: recordings of conversations have been published, and a small group of SI safety researchers has early access. The Verge notes that in the demos the replies sometimes sound awkward: in one recording the model at first mistook the speaker for someone else.
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