not at all creepy

Sorry I'm lost. The sample on the homepage sounds absolutely awful. Not one bit of the cadence individually and together, the tonal ranges in responses or the overall structure and feel is comfortable to listen to, it's so far off passing as 'real' that I feel like I must be missing something.

I'm surprised it took this long! Clearly the next step is joint training on text and audio. The speech realism is very good, but the intelligence is pretty clearly 2024-level.

crazy, if true!

These bidi/duplex demos always come off as overly artificial to me. It's cool that the model can speak at the same time as you instead of taking turns, but training it to interrupt as much as possible isn't the way to do it. In the very first example, did anyone here find the laugh after the "winter" answer to be convincing? What was the need for it? Why did the human speaker not get to finish a single sentence or finish a thought before the model took over with a monologue?

Can you instruction-train a duplex model like this? How would that look? I also wonder, if a model trained only on speech can develop world knowledge like this, could you train an image model only on images of text to essentially act as an LLM?

The speech is great, but you can see some cracks even in the first sound bit. near the end he asks the model to speak louder and initially the voice is louder but then goes back to the same level, also losing what she was saying just seconds ago and he has to lead back to the topic.

These full-duplex models are getting very "Her"-ish lately. gpt-live-1 is fantastic. Dessa, though, seems to be aiming at full human parity. There's a huge market for AI girlfriends that they should be looking into in earnest...

Both speakers in the examples sound unnatural. The human doesn't know what to talk about and seems to have little confidence. The robot says things that only mostly make sense and draws on, saying ultimately very little. "How's the winter stuff?" e.g. is not a sentence a person would say. I might say "How are you dealing with the snow?" or "Are you looking forward to winter?," but not "How's the winter stuff?" And there's just so many examples like this. Also, I'm not convinced that this "human-like" conversation with filler words and interruptions and pauses is actually what anyone wants, especially in absence of a face to interpret or a real human being to understand behind it. Even if it worked perfectly, it would feel uncanny and artificial because I know the person isn't real.

This is the crazy part. It seems pretty smart, and LLMs require 1000x more compute to train. Can this kind of efficiency somehow be achieved with text too?

Not bad, but I guess I lack the imagination to envision the use cases for such casual conversation. Other than... I suppose a certain demographic would be lining up to use this as the voice for their AI girlfriend.

Also I seem to be missing where/how they are selling this.

Ok. Sounds cool. Now what? Open source weights? An API somewhere? Available on Openrouter? Are they just testing?

Where is this going?

Now that a larger proportion of text is AI, I'm appreciating human-written text more and more; this got a good chuckle out of me.

I actually thought it sounds really good and natural and it freaked me out in a good way. You can tell that the robots have no idea of what they're talking about, but the voicing, the emotions, etc, really good.. Like talking to a friend on the phone. Also creepy, because of the potential for abuse of this technology.

But the interesting part to me is that training on voice only is what allows models to learn emotions - voice transmits a lot of emotional information which text doesn't capture. Language has words for a very limited number of emotions - maybe only the peaks - but there's so many more which we can't describe or transmit via text.

You could determine the phonetic tokens which express different kinds of emotions or 'render' text+emotion using a DSL, etc. Exciting stuff.

Now that a robot can speak over people on Zoom calls for me, I’m finally free to write poems all day!

Interesting tech, but if these are the hand-picked examples that best represent it, I suppose we're not quite there yet.

The intelligence sounds lacking. At this point, anyway.

But the idea of learning through voice instead of written text might prove fruitful. After all, text isn't strictly native to humans. It's just a tool we've invented.

This feels like a parlor trick where the AI was trained to mimic informal telephone mannerisms. The actual conversations were pretty bad. Lots of style, not much substance basically.

I was expecting to run into some uncanny valley-esque. It was surprisingly good.

It is kinda scary that we're here already, I can see this being pretty problematic for seniors/public prone to getting scammed.

Open weights or it didn't happen.

So, I tolerate the "ums" and "ahs" and "uhs" in conversation from humans because they're human. If an AI is going to speak to me (gods forbid), it better be concise and clear and focused, or I'm throwing it out the fucking window.

It is interesting that they've done this reasonably successfully, impressive technology. Novel ideas can have inherent value, absent direct uses they may have, as they can be a stepping stone toward other inventions. But, I'm having a hard time coming up with a use case that isn't predatory or intentionally misleading. Company support agents pretending to be human, for instance. Or, taking the next step on AI girlfriend/boyfriend type interactions. Or, outright scams. Models already do an excellent job with voice cloning, at least for intonation and timbre, adding realistic conversational tics makes it even more likely grandma is going to fall for it when her "nephew" calls needing help.

But, that seems to be extremely common with new tech these days. There's always an angle that is unsavory. Marketing, scams, propaganda, surveillance, killing, that's where the money is, so everything bends toward them.

Great. I wonder.. is this based on Mochi or PersonaPlex? Also, how big is the model, and do we use it?

Call me a skeptic, obviously the voice sounds plausible and very realistic and human-level but where does the intelligence come from if it's only trained on human speech datasets? LLMs are powerful because they can do anything, if you only have a voice corpus I doubt it is as powerful as all written human knowledge. Like when it says "My day was good", what does it actually mean? Or is it just generating plausible slop.

It sounds like it is trained on a lot of podcasts, judging by a quick few second skims over their demo tracks.

Also, the trend of posting on HN with much more sensationalist title first, getting to the front page, then getting the title adjusted by a moderator should probably be penalized; how is 'most authentic ever' not a marketing term? (not just this post, but a bunch of posts recently got to frontpage by making unreasonable claims)

Really impressive demo. I have to say that, but I do worry with this kind of fidelity to a human interaction that people will get more drawn into AI relationships and replace human contact.

I like voice as a mode of interaction with AI, but it’s always been clear with current tech that I’m talking to AI (and yet folks still got drawn into fantasy relationships thanks to sycophantic models etc) - I imagine with voice models like Dessa that could be worse for humans. This kind of fidelity blurs the lines of who or what the human is talking to and lets humans fall into an isolated world where they believe they are “socializing.”

Now, we could argue this is not a negative, maybe it is actually healthy for those who are looking for social connection or lonely, but my gut feel is that is not the case for most. It worries me that this kind of model will actually cause further deterioration of human socialisation and human-to-human contact.

I thought it sounded a little stilted and weird and then I realized that was the human half of the conversation.

The conversation with the AI fake wife was a little creepy, albeit honest about what this tech is probably going to be used for.

Sounds like they trained it on Boxxy or Kat from Sam and Kat. I guess it does sound like a human talking but in an affected unnatural way.

This is so awesome! How does it work with moving away from the mic, is it just random or does the conversational pattern lead it that way?

I know someone who recently came across a scammer where a guy impersonated a sheriff's deputy and tried to get money out of her. She told me the guy sounded like a real sheriff and made her believe the guy until he asked her to pay some money in Bitcoin. I can imagine that this type of scam could go viral soon. Even worse, someone could record our voice and fine-tune a model like this so that it can produce our voice and then talk to our family members to deceive them. It'd be a real trouble.

But can it follow a simple customer support script?

Most recent voice-related tech is using voice as an interface or interaction mode. It’s a means to an and, and the end is the value provided by the reasoning system on the other side of the voice.

This model is clearly not so smart. So the voice is the whole point, there’s not much value beyond it, at least on its own.

What that adds up to is, impersonation. That’s what this is for, impersonating humans.

The volume on this seemed so low and wouldn't get better even on max on my MacBook Air M5. Hoping it isn't my ears lol

Very impressive demo!

Dessa is written in a swirly feminine font.

There's no male or neutral voice.

All examples are of white male software engineers talking to what I assume will be ultimately marketed as a 'girlfriend' bot (or used for love scams).

The single paragraph hand waving at the importance of 'safe AI empathy' doesn't dissuade me at all.

Sell your idea as what it is, yet another 'perfect' woman shaped object a hypothetical man can own and use how he likes.

Authentic to what? That annoying clinger who loves interrupting you when you're trying to speak in turns?

Is having a duplex model constantly cutting in with uninteresting quips something people are looking for?

There's no way I would be able to detect if this was AI from the examples alone. If I got a phone call from a malicious agent using this tech, I probably wouldn't realize it. My plan is to ask a challenge question about a shared memory with people I personally know, if there's something suspicious about a call. I don't know how else to prevent it. It sucks to be this suspicious, but I can't help it.

There's so many potential scenarios. One scenario: An AI voice trainer trains on someone's social media video posts and get a pretty perfect copy. Then SIM jacks the target's phone number and calls pretending to need help. AIs could be used to mock ransom people, request bail money, ask for a change on a production server, etc.

People with high public visibility are likely targets, especially if they have money and or power. Impersonating them to subordinates would be an easy means of a social engineering attack.

The conversation examples are impressive but this made me say holy shit out loud: "it runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better. And we figured out how to train Dessa on only one NVIDIA GB200 NVL72."

If it really can replicate that low latency + that expressiveness on local devices, that's one heck of an accomplishment for "indie" AI.

It is cool but since there is no way to confirm ie. run it, or see it working somewhere, it can be also not real.

I get you are excited to share, but taking into account what your product is, it would be more powerful to let people experience it. As a creator of digital products, why would you put so much text on the homepage, anyhow you get the point.

ya if this is real this is magnitudes better than anything else out there, it honestly feels like it can't be real because its too real, i would be 100% fooled and never even question it wasn't a real person, i was more worried because of that, in that no one would be able to tell and you could have very engaging / emotional conversations that chatgpt/grok/claude etc can't even come close to

Those demos are, omg, like, the worst, donchya think?

reminds me of the last year hype around SesameAILabs/csm, people losing their mind over how realistic it was, only for them to disappear and never ship. sorry can't get hyped over some mp3s.

If you actually want your "AI" to interact with anything digital, are these voice-to-voice models going to...use speech to text? How does this model interact with anything that isn't an audio channel?

Passing a Turing test over a 5 minute conversation:

- Text interface: Done

- Voice interface: 5-10 years I’ll predict

The demo is nice, but enough obstacles remain that very few people would mistake it for a human over even a 5 min conversation. Chat systems configured to intentionally impersonate can already get people to mistake them for humans most of the time.

There’s been great progress in this area, direct response modeling, parallel reasoning, but last challenges are huge.

The reality is LLMs still seem dumb much more often without significant reasoning time (test time inference). On that point alone they are still an order of magnitude too slow for convincing interactive latency.

Of course they don’t need to meet this bar to be useful, systems are good enough today for lots of applications. It will just be interesting to see what the final delta ends up being.

Very technically impressive, but the fake conversation with the machine was cringe worthy to me; this pretending to care doesn't make me want to converse at all. The goal for me is to have an intelligent conversation that _adds_ to my experience; whatever I'm working on at the time. The AI girlfriend experience makes me cry inside rather than rejoice.

Why is every comment a brief "very impressive, nice job" on a high impact technology followed by a tangential semi-personal rant?

It sounds good, but...what the hell is it talking about?

The "Huge range in intonation and speed." example. "I had another ollie special". "I ordered a French vanilla latte, special from Maude [or is that Aldi?], springs and waffles, granny smith"...wtf does any of this mean?

She takes a sip of something and her "mouth is on fire...from all the sugar". She repeatedly calls herself "a ding".

Wanted to joke "AI girlfriend just dropped" but they explicitly have an AI girlfriend as the 3rd example.

Modern problems...

Close enough, welcome back Google Duplex!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM

For real though, it's been bothering me, how did they do this in 2018? (Some kind of symbolic logic based AI?)

Also props to the people at Block, Dessa is very cool :)

The real question is, does it actually understand sound?

Conventional LLMs are just running speech to text and then working on the text, so they can’t understand music or humming or any sort of sound.

Third example at 0:02:

Block is in the AI girlfriend market? Ew.

Wondering what kind of tokenization they use after the model referred to the movie Memento as The Mento the first time before being corrected.

The voice seems insanely immersive and uncanny. One issue that the full duplex models always have is tool calling. This is where GPT-Live [1] shines in the sense that you can use it as a fully practical agent. Looking forward to seeing how Dessa folks implement this.

[1] https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live/

it only works for english now, right? right?

This would be amazing for making audiobooks more expressive and like real storytelling. I kept telling Audible they needed to invest more into premium audio experiences, kind of the way you had the old radio plays that people used to tune into. The War of the Worlds! We are seeing some of that with full casts of actors doing readings more.

At the same time, imagine if every book was like a living thing you could interact with and buying the book partially bought you access to the model that would tell you the story. The only way you would interact with that particular model, is if you bought the book.

It reads the book to you and you could chime in or it would know when to pause if there's an interruption without you needing to manually pause. You say hey wait, why is this character so angry? Then it kind of naturally reacts and continues the story. Maybe you come back to it 3 years later and it remembers you liked a certain part of the book and injects "here comes the good part!" It hears you start snoring and begins lowering its voice and whispering, but remembers you asked it to wake you up loudly if you start snoring, so it bolts out HEYWAKEUP!

For a lot of people books are a very solitary thing, though of course there are social clubs and book readings. Almost makes me think of those magical books you see fantasy wizards having, where the books themselves are sentient. It would be crazy if they released a The Princess Bride book and had the real narrator's voice and you could interrupt him and he could harass you about all your interruptions.

It wasn't that long ago where we were talking about having games and movies blend so the movies become interactive experiences. We're really getting closer to some of these static mediums becoming more like, trained behavioral meshes that have a personality and you can kind of naturally spend time with it. I'm not sure I'd be big on paintings on the wall coming to life and talking to you like in Harry Potter, but there's some promise.

Game worlds are an obvious extension, not just through NPCs, but if anyone remembers that game called Bastion where there was a narrator explaining the events as they went on. You could imagine a model that could watch you play and speak naturally, being funny or narrating. Almost something like Mystery Science Theater 3000 or how Beavis and Butthead would react to music videos.

I don't think those should be pervasive or the new norm, but there probably is an opportunity there and a market for it. Some kind of social-like presence that doesn't get tired, doesn't get bored, always has the same schedule you do, etc.

Hell, that reminds me of Seaman on the Dreamcast, too. SEGA could make a new Seaman and it would actually be awesome. Like a blend between Nintendogs, a fish, and some AI. There could even be charming goofy antics it tries to pull where it knows it's stuck inside a game and tries ridiculous things to manipulate you into letting it out. Some kind of Pinky and the Brain charm.

Anybody on board with this future?

It obv does have an extremely natural humane sound to it, but I feel like if you pay attention to what it actually says there is a noticeable lack of intelligence behind it.

It honestly sounds a bit like a teenager's stream of consciousness to me, that's how they sound to me anyways.

Is there a way for me to test it online? Also does it support other languages beyond English? I'm greek and there aren't many good solutions for us ...

This isnt really super clear on the nuts and bolts. Would be nice if you could pipe it into a proper brain, but I am assuming the speech2speech means it's fixed with whatever it was trained with. Even for an AI girlfriend use that's not going to work.

where's weight?

This is extremely valuable for language education.

This is like having on demand access to a conversational partner at all times. But there is no embarrassment factor, patience, or concern about wasting an instructors time. Because the model is trained entirely on audio and not a voice to text add on, you can provide a human extremely high quality feedback and training.

And it’s cheap to run.

It doesn’t need to be smart the way a SOTA LLM is smart. There’s tons of value here already. You can tack it onto another system for deep intelligence.

Honestly: fuck these people. In the span of a demo they have dogwhistled the market to:

- Build advertising on their platform.

- Build AI girlfriends on their platform.

Gross. I mean it's not like the market isn't already thinking of doing that, it's not a leap of a conclusion. Just kind of gross to be on the nose about it with the content and choice of demos.

It doesn't say how I can run it in llama.cpp locally. By next week I'll have forgotten all about it.

Yeah. This is game changing for full-duplex, but still has no production use case.

I can't think of many positive usecases for this. I do not need or want my machines to sound deceptively human.