Corroborated event · 3 outlets
Block introduced Dessa, a speech model trained on human speech that processes audio directly and is designed to recognize emotions, sarcasm and pauses in real time.
AI brief
Block, Jack Dorsey's company, announced an AI model called Dessa that it says was trained from scratch on nothing but human conversation, and shared sample chats with humans that it described as occasionally awkward and uncanny.
Written by AI from The Verge AI's published text.
More coverage of this story (2)
Block introduces Dessa AI voice model
Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human
TechCrunch AI · 24 Oct 2026, 16:00
Block's new AI model Dessa was trained entirely on human speech to catch emotions text-based models miss
The Decoder · 24 Oct 2026, 14:09
Primary source
“Jack Dorsey's Block announced an AI model called Dessa that's trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny.”
Reporting from a publisher outside the organisation being covered.
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