Block's Dessa Achieves Breakthrough in Human-Like Voice AI, Raising Both Wonder and Fraud Concerns

Block, the financial services company founded by Jack Dorsey, unveiled Dessa on October 23, 2026, a full-duplex voice AI model trained exclusively on human speech that can engage in real-time conversation with startling naturalness, immediately sparking both enthusiasm and warnings about potential misuse. The model represents a departure from conventional voice AI systems that convert speech to text—a process that, according to Block, discards crucial emotional and tonal information. Instead, Dessa learns directly from audio recordings of human conversations, preserving pauses, laughter, sarcasm, and shifts in tone that typically disappear in text-based pipelines.