The abject misery of dealing with one of the many bureaucracies of the state offers such opportunities in abundance. While this is dull and at times frustrating, it's mostly harmless. But we are now in an age where robots can sound like humans: very convincingly, at that.
Dessa, the new artificial intelligence model from Jack Dorsey's Block, is on the cutting edge of human mimicry. This is anything but dull—or harmless. Dorsey said on X that it is "the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built." It listens while it talks, cutting in, laughing mid-sentence, and murmuring along as people do.
For decades, a robotic voice was a safety feature. It told you instantly that nobody was there. Dessa was built to remove that tell, for benevolent reasons.
But with it goes one of the last easy ways to know who, or what, is on the line. Lifelike AI voices aren’t new. What's new is how Dessa learned.
Block says it was trained only on recorded human conversation, so it keeps every little sigh and giggle and stumble. It's a research preview with hand-picked demos, but the direction is clear. Let's first consider the upsides.
This will make it easier for the creative industries to use AI to generate more realistic productions. It's a significant reduction in cost for them. That may open up the media to people bursting with ideas who would otherwise have struggled to gain access, or see their creative potential realized.
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