Block's new AI model Dessa was trained entirely on human speech to catch emotions text-based models miss

Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, has unveiled Dessa, an AI speech model it says is the first trained entirely on human speech with no text data, built from scratch. Dessa processes speech directly as audio rather than converting it to text first, letting it pick up on emotions, sarcasm, laughter and pauses in real time, and it supports full-duplex communication so it can listen and talk at the same time. It runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max, was trained on a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, and is not yet publicly available, with the team first seeking AI security researchers to test it for unexpected risks.