Jack Dorsey’s venture Block has introduced an artificial‑intelligence model named Dessa, which the company says was built “from scratch on nothing but human conversation.” To illustrate the system’s capabilities, Block released several example exchanges that sometimes feel a bit odd or uncanny.
One of the demos, posted by Dessa’s lead Ragavan Thurairatnam, shows a relatively natural back‑and‑forth between the model and a user, though the AI initially confuses the speaker with someone called “Ronaldo.”
“We made the first AI model you can have a realistic conversation with that was trained entirely on speech! Dessa is a full‑duplex speech‑to‑sp …,” the post reads.
The Verge covered the announcement in more detail.