Open weights or it didn't happen.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

Modern problems...

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.

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".

it only works for english now, right? right?

Third example at 0:02:

>Dessa: Hey, baby.

Block is in the AI girlfriend market? Ew.