Listen to a few of these.
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). And it had to learn far more than language. Accents, pauses, breathing, sarcasm, humor, inflection, emotion, when to cut in: every one changes what someone means.
Dessa is an AI experiment trained entirely on audio of human speech. They describe it as if it were pure research, but I’m sure there’s a commercial idea in the back of it somewhere.
The top waveform is the human, the bottom is Dessa (if you look at the closed captioning, it also identifies who is who). The company swears the conversations are unscripted. The AI interrupts, laughs, says things under its breath – all entirely appropriate.
At one point, it’s having a conversation about Christopher Nolan movies. If it isn’t accessing a database outside itself (and the copy says it isn’t), it must have heard a conversation along those lines in training. You’d think there’d be enormous blank areas.
Anyway, it’s worth reading the description and very worth listening to some of the audio samples.
Posted: October 26th, 2026 under personal.
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Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.<< carry me back to ol' virginny