Block, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey, has announced Dessa, an artificial intelligence model that its team says was trained from scratch using only recordings of human conversation, The Verge reports.
The developers describe Dessa as a true speech-to-speech model that never converts what people say into text, and say it can run locally on a high-end MacBook Pro. Sample conversations released by Block show a largely natural back and forth, though some exchanges come across as awkward or uncanny, including one in which the model mistakes the speaker for someone else.
The team says it built Dessa out of curiosity, to improve understanding between people and AI, and for safety, arguing that current voice assistants are nearly deaf to emotion in a speaker's voice. Early access will go to a small group of AI safety researchers.
Source: The Verge AI
