Dessa
Block announced Dessa, a speech-to-speech model trained from scratch on only human conversation, which can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better.
Dessa is described as a true speech-to-speech model, so it does not turn speech into text first, and everything it knows came from human speech. Block says it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better. A small group of AI safety researchers will get early access.
- Date
- Friday 23 October 2026
- Lab
- Block
- Kind
- model
- Access
- research preview
Access is limited to a small group of AI safety researchers at first. Public availability, weights and parameter counts were not stated in the page read.
Sources
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