Dessa: the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built

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.

> LLMs need an insane amount of text. Dessa learned language from hundreds of times fewer words (in fairness, LLMs also have to learn C++ and whatever the hell Angular is).

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.

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 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)

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?

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...

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.

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.