Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human

Key points

• Block, the company led by Jack Dorsey, has released a new voice model called Dessa from its research lab. The company says the model is trained entirely on human speech and runs on a single Nvidia GPU rack.
• Dessa can talk and listen at the same time, and it can run on a consumer-grade computer. Block says emotion is built into the model, rather than added through text tags.
• The model is not yet publicly available, and the company has asked safety researchers to test it for ways a voice agent could deceive people.