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Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, has introduced Dessa, a speech model that processes audio directly instead of converting it to text first. Dessa is designed to recognize emotions, sarcasm and pauses in real time. The model runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max but isn't publicly available yet.
Read the original →Technology helps accelerate national development, while culture, ethics and belief give that development depth. Artificial intelligence can process data but cannot replace humans in judgments involving fairness, compassion and responsibility toward those left behind.
Read the original →The skills that technology cannot easily replicate, from leading teams to creating memorable guest experiences, are taking on greater significance.
Read the original →Block announced Dessa as a research preview, a conversational AI trained from scratch on human conversational audio without using text. It is a full-duplex model that speaks while listening and reacts to laughter and changes in loudness. It runs locally on a MacBook Pro (M4 Max or higher) and is being offered first to AI safety researchers.
Read the original →On October 23, Agora founder and CEO Zhao Bin proposed a "five-level dialogue capability" framework at the iRTE2026 real-time intelligence conference.
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