In the continuous bid to create consciousness through artificial general intelligence, a new AI giant may have cracked the code on cloning human speaking patterns with precise accuracy. The only problem is that this linguistically adept bot is kind of dumb when you get it to open its mouth.
Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey took to X in late October to announce an impressive, yet baffling new AI platform called Dessa. Dessa is a voice AI chatbot that specializes in conversational interactions. In the demos, users speak to the bot like they’re having a conversation with a human, and the bot speaks back with a realistic human voice, complete with pauses, inflections, and other traits that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
Linguistically, it is impressive. Its vocal cadence and inflections are indistinguishable from real people. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem very intelligent.
Many other chatbots have voice modes, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. But so far, all of them are just robotic enough to tell them apart from a real human. Dessa changes that. It is a full-duplex speech-to-speech model that was trained exclusively on human speech samples.
Full-duplex speech is the kind of conversational interactions humans engage in every day. It means that Dessa can both listen in real time and respond in real time without pausing to process what was said. Interactions just feel natural — maybe too natural.
Block Inc., the company behind Dessa, claims that no text-based models were used at all to train the bot — only real voice samples. Ultimately, it learned how to talk like a human by listening to humans, and now it can reply in real time like a human, too.
In this video posted by Block Inc. to X, a real human speaks with Dessa about launching the speech model. In the example, the male human begins by asking Dessa — portrayed as a woman — how it’s doing. It responds that it is well, followed by a hesitant question about the upcoming winter weather. Dessa poses its question with natural hesitancy, as if it knows the male speaker doesn’t like winter. Its voice inflection even shifts with a nervous laugh thrown in for good measure as it dives into the touchy subject.
The near-three-minute clip continues as the two discuss Dessa’s upcoming launch. Throughout, Dessa responds with genuine excitement, natural pauses and stammers, and endearing laughs that make it all feel real. It can speak louder on request by coming closer to the faux microphone that it is talking into. At the end of the demo, Dessa was asked what it would ask itself to do in the future. Dessa suggested that it could be used for something simple like advertising, or something far more complex, like revealing the secrets of consciousness.
All in all, the short conversation sounds like something that could easily happen between two real people. Between a person and a bot, though, the tiny linguistic nuisances in Dessa’s speech patterns are impressive, albeit uncanny. If you close your eyes and listen, you might even forget that Dessa isn’t real.
In a second video posted by Block Inc., a real human girl plays a guessing game with Dessa, this time portrayed as a man. She asks it to guess a number of items she has assembled from around her home with minimal hints. Dessa gets lucky with the first item, guessing a toothbrush from her bathroom on the first round.
The interaction falls apart, though, when she tells Dessa that her next item — a pen — is one thing that people use to study. Dessa guesses a notebook and pen together — clearly two items instead of one, subtly breaking the rules of the game. When the human girl doesn’t tell Dessa that it guessed half correct, it guesses again, this time suggesting a flashlight, which doesn’t even make sense as a study tool. On the third guess, Dessa suggested a toothbrush again, deviating even further from something people would use to study.
After a correction from the human girl and a bit more guidance, Dessa muddles through several more guesses— a pencil and a book before finally landing correctly on a pen.
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Moor Studio/Getty Images
Based on the two videos alone, several things are clear about Dessa. Linguistically, it is impressive. Its vocal cadence and inflections are indistinguishable from real people. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem very intelligent. Some of its responses in the first video were vague and unorganized, forcing the male human to intentionally guide the conversation. As for the second video, Dessa simply failed to follow directions, and it misunderstood the purpose of some of the items it guessed during the game.
This is an early version, though, and Dessa is likely to get better over time. All Block Inc. needs is a smarter model to turn Dessa into a concerning piece of software. Imagine the chaos hackers, scammers, and faux influencers could cause by creating fake humans that sound real as they carry out phishing schemes to trick people out of their money.
In fact, I’m having a hard time understanding why Dessa should exist at all. As the female version said in the first video, maybe Dessa could be used by advertisers. Although AI giants recently retreated from replacing human workers with AI wholesale, Dessa could easily stand in as a fake social media influencer to push marketing campaigns online.
Dessa also thought that it could answer the question on whether consciousness can be programmed into a machine — an existential crisis that the pope already answered definitively for Anthropic. Since this is a question humans — or maybe even only God — can answer, whatever Dessa has to say here is moot.
Maybe Dessa could become a personal friend or a life companion where users waste their time telling all of their deepest secrets to a corporate robot instead of confiding in real people through real relationships. Certainly that won’t end in irreparable bouts of AI psychosis that warp users’ minds as it drags them into digital isolation.
In fact, none of the things Dessa can do today are particularly good for mental health, personal stability, or society at large. Yet Block Inc. and the other AI giants keep trying to make some kind of AI experience that enthralls people enough to finally generate some money — something that looks even less likely now that the AI bubble is primed to burst.
Dessa is not available to the public yet, and there is currently no release date set at this time.
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Jack dorsey, Ai bubble, Artificial intelligence, Chatbot, Tech
