Block's Dessa: The Voice AI That Learned to Talk From Speech Alone
Block’s in-house AI research lab unveiled Dessa on October 23, 2026, a full-duplex speech-to-speech model it says was trained from scratch on nothing but recorded human conversation. Lab lead Ragavan Thurairatnam called it “a GPT-3 moment for speech,” while Block has published no benchmarks yet — only demo recordings. Sources: TechCrunch, Unite.AI, The Indian Express, October 2026.