Block introduces Dessa, an AI trained only on human speech that runs offline
From the AI digest for 2026-10-24
What happened: Block, the payments company founded by Jack Dorsey, has introduced Dessa, an AI model trained entirely on human speech — without text data or pretrained models — that reportedly talks like a human and can run locally on a MacBook without an internet connection, according to an MSN report (published about 4:00 AM ET October 24). It is a single syndicated source: the original outlet is not named in the copy, so the details stand uncorroborated.
What's genuinely new: Speech-only training is the claim that distinguishes the model if it holds — learning from human voice alone rather than text and pretrained components — paired with the unusual selling point of offline operation on an ordinary laptop.
Watch: First-party confirmation from Block, details on model size and training data, latency and quality against text-trained voice systems, and what Dessa is actually aimed at.
Links: MSN