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

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?

- 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.

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.

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 :)

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.