Bluesky gets the lion’s share of press when it comes to Jack Dorsey’s non-Twitter projects, so it might be easy to forget he was also one of the developers of Square, the ubiquitous point-of-sale system that has a number of noteworthy subsidiaries like Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal.

Square also changed its name to Block, Inc. in 2021. Perhaps sensing a way to acquaint the unfamiliar with the rebranded business by way of earned media hits, Block just released an AI model with a bit of a twist.

The model’s name is Dessa and Block’s announcement post says it was “trained from scratch on nothing but human conversation.” Block claims that “talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.”

As reported in The Verge , Dessa processes and generates audio directly using speech-to speech architecture rather than converting input speech to text and generating a response like conventional voice models.…