Block Launches Dessa, a Speech-Only AI Model That Runs Locally on MacBooks

Block, Jack Dorsey's financial-services company, unveiled Dessa, a full-duplex speech-to-speech AI model trained entirely on human conversation and capable of running on consumer hardware like a MacBook Pro M4 Max. The announcement on October 23, 2026 marks a departure from prevailing speech-AI architectures: rather than converting audio to text or building on pretrained language models, Dessa processes sound directly, learning conversational patterns from recordings alone.