Speech is in quite a weird spot when it comes to locally running it. Some of the best STT and TTS models run at faster-than-realtime speed on decent consumer hardware with quite small models (so also no huge RAM requirements), but the tooling and library ecosystem is much more fragmented, making it a lot harder to build actual working products around it. There is also a much more noticeable coverage / quality gap when it comes to languages other than English.
As a speech-to-speech model Dessa is of course in a different ballpark, but given the intelligence it exhibits, it seems to be working with not that many parameters. The developers also seem to be admitting that to some degree ("in fairness, LLMs also have to learn C++ and whatever the hell Angular is"). I'm wondering what the utility of this would be. Given that it lacks both broad world knowledge and tool calling integration in any way, that seems kind of like a dead-end.
As a speech-to-speech model Dessa is of course in a different ballpark, but given the intelligence it exhibits, it seems to be working with not that many parameters. The developers also seem to be admitting that to some degree ("in fairness, LLMs also have to learn C++ and whatever the hell Angular is"). I'm wondering what the utility of this would be. Given that it lacks both broad world knowledge and tool calling integration in any way, that seems kind of like a dead-end.