Shogo Kikuchi

Dessa: Block's voice AI that acts human

Jack Dorsey's company Block showed Dessa on Oct 23, 2026: a speech-to-speech model trained only on human conversation. It laughs, pauses, says "yeah" while you talk, and can jump in before you finish. What it does, what it can't do yet, and the waitlist.

From the reels

Reel 42 · full breakdown · October 27, 2026

THE 60-SECOND VERSION

  • Dessa is a voice AI from a small research lab at Block, the company behind Square and Cash App. The lab reports to Jack Dorsey.
  • Most voice AI turns your speech into text, thinks in text, then reads the answer back. Dessa never uses text. It was trained from scratch on human conversation.
  • That's why it laughs, pauses and talks over you the way people do. It's full-duplex: it listens while it talks.
  • You can't use it yet. It's waitlist only.

01 · 3 things

What it does

  1. Speech in, speech out

    A speech-to-speech model trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation." No text, no pretrained models.

  2. Listens while it talks

    Full-duplex, so it can say "yeah" while you're still talking, or finish your sentence before you do. In Block's film it says "Rises?" before the person gets to it.

  3. Makes up its own voice

    In Block's demos, each conversation starts with a voice and a character Dessa makes up on the spot.

02 · 3 details

How it was built

  1. Training

    Block says it trained Dessa on one NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 (a single rack).

  2. Runs locally

    Block says it runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better.

  3. The team

    The lab was founded by former members of Dessa, the Toronto deep-learning startup Square bought in 2020. That startup made the fake Joe Rogan voice in 2019. Square renamed itself Block in 2021.

03 · 2 points

What to watch

  1. Not open yet

    Only a small group of AI safety researchers has early access. Everyone else joins the waitlist.

    What to do: Join the waitlist on the official page below.

  2. Not very smart yet

    Block's own team says in the launch film that it's "not very intelligent" at the moment. It's built to sound and act human, not to answer hard questions.

Good to know

  • Availability is as of Oct 27, 2026 and may change.

Sources

Free for people building with Claude Code

Two of us run a six‑figure business on this Claude Code setup.

Most setups forget who you are every session. This one knows your goal, pushes back when you drift, and checks its own work. Take the starter version. It takes 15 minutes to set up.

claude · your-notes/

✻

CLAUDE.md

  • START-HERE.md
  • CLAUDE.md
  • prompts/interview.md
  • agents/verifier.md
  • diagnostic.md

Confirm your email and the download starts. One email a week after that, unsubscribe any time.

MORE LIKE THIS

I break down one AI tool you can actually use in every reel.

@copilot_shogo on Instagram ↗Everything from the reels