Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has introduced a new speech model named Dessa from his company Block. Announcing the development, Dorsey said in his X post that Voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence and Dessa is the most authentic full-duplex speech model.

The speech model is compact and can be run on a laptop. “This is big (but also really, really small…small enough to run on your MacBook). “I’m extremely proud of the Dessa team for pushing the frontier!” Dorsey wrote in his post describing the flexibility of the model. The company claims that inference runs faster than real time, and there is no latency. It runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better.

Dessa is claimed to be trained from scratch on real human conversations. There is no text and no pretrained models involved. The most remarkable thing about Dessa, according to the company, is that it listens and talks at the same time, meaning audio in and audio out, with no transcription layer in between.…