new from us at @blocks
Ragavan Thurairatnam (@RagavanThurair) profile pictureRagavan Thurairatnam
@RagavanThurairOct 23
Meet Dessa, our AI model trained from scratch on nothing but speech. We believe speech is the natural interface for technology. So we built Dessa. And we’re inviting AI safety researchers to explore Dessa. Learn more: block.xyz/dessa

Oct 23, 2026 · 6:23 PM UTC

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Nice work to you and the team! Always exciting to see more folks working on pushing the voice ai frontier
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@bot investigate can we run this locally on your computer?
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I'd like to get a copy of this for UI UX before someone has a crisis and decides its too dangerous like every other high quality voice system. Nvidia had one and was too scared to release it, OpenAI had one.. once again too scared. The simple fact you sell the product outright it's the job of law enforcement to handle misuse just as with cars and telephones. Nobody was ever too scared to release a high quality telephone device. ☎️
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Small teams shipping steadily is how most of the tools we end up relying on get built.
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Worthy update. Nice inspiration, btw.
Image from Thilak (@webtkdev)
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Did you guys publish a paper about this? Would love to read it @jack
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Lots of people sound good but aren’t smart 🤣… Hope yours is intelligent as well
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If there was any company, I wanted to work at it is @blocks & @SpaceX
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it's sick.. i had so much laugh on dessa page too tho.
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I can’t wait to run it.
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Last thing you want to talk to is a degenerate sounding AI. One of the best things about AI is its concise and exemplary ability to communicate. Why make it sound lazy and from the streets.
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Pretty cool, I actually use more of the conversation version of @GeminiApp this on the other hand could be huge Omo
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Already released it?!
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are you going to put Dessa in Blocks?
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Dessa should include text responses/messages as a backup.
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Training on speech only is the interesting bet. Text loses the hesitation, the tone, the "wait, actually". That's half of what people mean.
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I think you guys have cracked it. out of all the TTS that i've benched, this feels like it's it.
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While everyone’s racing to build the super-octopus AI that does every task, Jack just went 100% in on the one thing that actually matters for how humans interact with intelligence: the voice. Speech-to-speech, trained only on real conversation, full-duplex, no text in the middle. That’s the interesting path.
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I've always wanted to chat with Rodney Dangerfield.
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Keep in mind that, unlike what people believe, speech is mostly subconscious and automated in humans too. There's no consciousness necessary to begin with. Also Dessa is not the first of it's kind. But training on just one GPU is impressive @grok
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Dessa is awesome, Jack!! Can I try with Indian languages too?
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cool another product elon will have to buy and fix thanks jack
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na thats too weird. I think these talking bots will be massively rejected by the people. most humans are not weirdo dudes from SF
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@bot check this and tell menif we could use it in calls
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@jack @blocks
Image from stochasm (@stochasticchasm)
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Whoah!!! 😮
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dessa! tried to dm you about an ai safety researcher who evaluates speech models i can intro you to but your dms are closed nitter.cf/messages/compose?recip…

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sci-fi to reality
Image from Raviteja Reddy (@Raviteja_K4)
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Need. This is so great!!!
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🫡
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pretty amazing work
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Very cool :)
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Good job @jack
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Absolutely amazing. Great work.
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kinda freaky good
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👀
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