If interacting with Siri has been the extent of your experience "talking" to AI, you're in for a rude awakening. While Apple's voice assistant often fumbles basic commands and can take an unnaturally long time to process a request, the latest and greatest AI models are moving closer and closer to natural human speech.
Case in point: Dessa, the brainchild of Jack Dorsey's Block, is allegedly the world's first full-duplex speech model, meaning it can listen to you and speak simultaneously, much like a real human does in the flow of normal conversation. In fact, that's Dessa's draw: it was trained entirely on human speech to make it as natural-sounding as possible.
But these claims have to be heard to be appreciated, and Block's press release announcing Dessa shows just how far AI models have come to approximating the rhythm of natural human conversation.
In the second sample audio clip, for example, a real-life human and Dessa have an extended conversation about the movies of Christopher Nolan, and though the model does flex its knowledge at certain points, supplying a movie title, for example, it does so in a natural rather than robotic way, mirroring the tone of his human interlocutor while keeping up what, to human ears, sounds like a perfectly ordinary back-and-forth about Nolan's cinematic world.
") with genuine surprise and enthusiasm, complete with the conversation markers you would expect from a human being: audible gasps, a joyful enthusiasm that verges on tears, and even a difficulty finding the right words.
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