Block, the payments firm formerly known as Square, has released Dessa, a speech-to-speech AI model trained from scratch on nothing but human conversation. It handles audio directly instead of transcribing to text, so it can listen and speak at the same time, giving replies a more natural cadence and fewer of the robotic pauses common in voice assistants. Block says it runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max and that a small group of AI safety researchers already have early access. https://gizmodo.com/check-out-the-many-uncanny-human-ish-voices-from-blocks-new-ai-model-2000830237 #AI #GenAI #AIresearch