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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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