Dessa is Block's speech-to-speech model, trained only on human conversation, and it is not a public download yet.
What is on the site today
The page is at block.xyz/dessa. Opening dessa.com returns the same page, and the canonical link points back to block.xyz/dessa. The header shows a Download button. That button has no address. Clicking it runs a message that says the download is coming soon. Waitlist buttons sit in the page markup and are hidden. The same click handler would say the waitlist opens soon. The page does not list a price, a paper, a model card, or a weight file.
The image on this listing is Block's share card, a pale line drawing on a black field. It is their marketing image, not a conversation recorded by Seailife.
How they describe the model
Block calls Dessa a speech-to-speech model. They say it was trained from scratch on human conversation, with no text and no pretrained model underneath, and that everything it knows came from human speech. They say it is full-duplex, so it can listen and talk at the same time, and that it uses the short replies people make while someone else is still talking, such as "yeah," "got it," and "ooh." They say inference runs faster than real time, and that it runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better.
They write that, as far as they know, Dessa is the first AI you can hold a realistic live conversation with that was trained only on human speech. That sentence is theirs. This listing did not run the model.
They also say it learned language from hundreds of times fewer words than the text models they have in mind, and that they trained it on one NVIDIA GB200 NVL72. The page does not give the word count or a training log.
The recordings
The page says every clip is a live recording of a person talking to Dessa, that nobody steers what it says, and that the subtitles were added afterward. The clips include talking about the release, remembering a movie, an anniversary surprise, and a conversation with GPT-Live-1. On that last clip they add a separate note: both voices are generated, GPT-Live-1 is a third-party model, and its developer is not affiliated with Block and has not reviewed or endorsed Dessa.
They say more recordings will be posted on the X account of Ragavan Thurairatnam, who signs the page as Dessa lead.
Who can apply
They say they are giving early access to a small group of AI safety researchers, so those researchers can look for risks the lab has not anticipated. The "get in touch" control opens a Google Form titled "Work with us to make Dessa safe." The form says it was created inside Block, Inc. It asks for a name, an institutional email, and an optional Google Scholar or blog link. The form is here.
The lab and the privacy notice
They describe the group as a small AI research lab at Block, started by former members of Dessa, the Toronto deep learning startup. They say the lab has built deep learning models since 2012 and generative speech models for more than eight years, and that it reports to Jack Dorsey, Block's cofounder, chairman, and Block Head. The address on the page is [email protected].
The page lists six researchers in alphabetical order: Louay Hazami, Hashiam Kadhim, Qi (Alex) Liu, Rayhane Mama, Aydin Polat, and Marc Tyndel. It also lists current interns Cara Ji, Jibran Iqbal Shah, and Dvir Zagury-Grynbaum, and former interns Aryan Sharma and Olivia Yan.
The privacy notice is effective October 21, 2026. It is from Block, Inc. and its affiliates, and it says it covers the dessa.com website only. Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and TIDAL each keep their own notice. The notice says the service is a general-audience site and is not directed at children under 13. The privacy contact is [email protected], or Block, Inc. (Attn: Privacy), 1955 Broadway, Suite 600, Oakland, CA 94612.