Can Block turn an agentic voice layer into a merchant growth tool?
- Block is betting voice AI could help Square become more valuable to merchants by improving the workflows that drive sales and service.
- Turning this ambition into merchant value will depend on execution: accurate orders, useful recommendations, and measurable returns that justify the added cost.
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Can Block turn an agentic voice layer into a merchant growth tool?
Voice AI could give Square a bigger role in restaurant operations, but the business case still needs to add up.
Block is exploring two separate applications of voice AI, at different stages of development. One is Square Kiosk, a self-service ordering product for restaurants launched in October. The $1,999 device lets customers use voice or touch to browse menus, customize orders, and pay.
The other is Dessa, a voice model Block developed to make AI conversations sound and feel more natural. It is a separate research project, currently available to a small group of AI safety researchers, with a waitlist for others.
Dessa sits much earlier in the technology stack. Rather than following the conventional sequence of speech recognition, text processing, and text-to-speech, it processes audio directly. Its speech-to-speech architecture is designed to listen and respond simultaneously. Block says it trained the model from scratch on NVIDIA hardware using recorded human conversations, without text data or a pretrained model.
That makes Dessa a voice interface for AI, rather than a functional agentic system. It could eventually provide the conversational layer for an AI agent, but Block has not shown that Dessa can access external systems, make decisions, or take actions such as checking menu availability and completing an order. Making conversation feel natural is a different challenge from reliably understanding orders and meeting the accuracy and transaction requirements of a commercial ordering flow.
Block’s more immediate business opportunity lies with Square Kiosk, where the company can test whether an agentic voice layer delivers measurable value to merchants.
Square already has the pieces agentic AI needs
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