Block introduces Dessa, an AI trained only on human speech that runs offline
From the AI digest for Oct 24, 2026
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; the copy does not name the outlet that originally reported it, so those details stand without a named first source. Gizmodo followed at about 8:00 AM ET October 24 with the model's voice samples — many uncanny, human-ish voices — and confirms the model goes by Dessa.
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. Gizmodo's listen-through adds the early qualitative read: the voices are convincing enough to be unsettling.
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.