Block Unveils Human Sounding Voice AI Called Dessa, and Scam Fears Follow

Jack Dorsey’s payments company has revealed a voice AI model named Dessa that, in company demos, comes across as remarkably close to a real person. Unlike many systems that turn speech into text before replying, Dessa works with audio directly and was trained only on human speech. It can listen while it talks, so it handles interruptions, laughter and shifts in tone. Dorsey said talking with it feels like talking with a person, full of emotion, pauses and natural rhythm. Block says the demo conversations were recorded live with nobody steering the replies.

How Dessa Was Built and What Is Still Unknown

Block says it trained the model from scratch on a single Nvidia GB200 NVL72 system, and it is small enough to run locally on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max chip or better. For now it is only a research preview.

Public Reaction Splits Between Awe and Scam Concerns

Many social media users were amazed, with one saying he had never heard anything artificial that sounded so human and another calling it sci-fi. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao suggested it could help his education project GiggleAcademy, since teaching kids with today’s AI voices has been hard. Others were alarmed.