Block’s AI lab has released Dessa, a speech-to-speech model trained only on human conversation audio. It is described as full-duplex, meaning it can listen and speak at the same time. Block says it runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max, but has not shared the model’s size, benchmark results or weights.
Why it matters
For MacBook Pro M4 Max owners, local operation could allow speech interactions without sending audio to a remote service, though Block has not shared enough details to confirm what the model can do or how it performs.
