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Block announces Dessa, a full-duplex voice AI model trained to generate natural human-like speech conversations

Model release Provisional 90% confidence first seen 23 October 2026, 15:32

Block announced Dessa, a voice AI model intended to hold realistic back-and-forth (full-duplex) conversations with humans. The company says the model was trained from scratch on human conversation data and was released for testing in limited form while it is not yet broadly publicly available, with Block encouraging safety researchers to evaluate it.

Block Dessa Jack Dorsey NVIDIA Ragavan Thurairatnam

Source coverage

23 Oct, 15:32 Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend The Verge independent 24 Oct, 16:00 Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human TechCrunch independent

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TLDRocket 24 October 2026

The day’s main thread is the quiet engineering work behind “agentic” software: making agents produce code without outrunning the ability to verify it. Anthropic reported that its merged code changes climbed from about 2,500 per day in May to over 30,000 per day by September as it folded more autonomous “software factory” workflows into Claude Code. The argument isn’t more autonomy; it’s a better governor. That showed up in other safety-forward tooling: AWS’s Continuum security agent hit 89.0% end-to-end task completion on CyberGym-E2E, but only 37.8% of its patches fixed the specific historical bug—an important reminder that passing tests isn’t the same as fixing the right thing. Even Kubernetes came in with a lesson about control loops: average cluster CPU sat around 8% while node provisioning stayed high, because HPA, VPA, KEDA, GitOps, and node autoscalers can make contradictory bets.

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Block announces Dessa, a full-duplex voice AI model trained to generate natural human-like speech conversations

Source coverage

Every AI story that matters, in your inbox by 8am.

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