Jack Dorsey’s Block unveils Dessa, an AI voice model trained entirely on human conversations

Jack Dorsey's Block says its new speech-to-speech model skips text entirely and learns to talk the way people actually talk Jack Dorsey’s Block has introduced Dessa, an AI model it describes as trained “from scratch on nothing but human conversation.” No books, no web pages, no text of any kind. Just people talking. The pitch is realism. The demos show a model that handles timing, interruptions, laughter and pauses with surprising ease. They also show it calling a user “Ronaldo” for no clear reason, which is a very human mistake in its own way. Dessa launched on October 23, 2026, through a page at block.xyz/dessa and a round of posts on X. Block’s internal AI research lab is behind it, led by Ragavan Thurairatnam. The name has history.

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