Philip Seers, a founding partner of Phoenix and an ex-DLJ director, is investing in and joining Vox Generation as a non-executive director. Vox wants to become Europe's first natural language voice portal player, and has developed a prototype that will allow people to give instructions to telephones, computers and eventually internet portals, as well as access information.

Seers said: 'The use of push buttons to operate electronic devices will increasingly be seen as yesterday's technology.