Zoo Station
Adam Cheyer joins forces with Project Voice Capital Partners; free voice/AI event tomorrow afternoon in San Jose
U2 found itself in the recording studio in late 1990, faced with the daunting task of following up their critically-acclaimed The Joshua Tree.
Bono was particularly dissatisfied with the band’s artistic direction.
He heard producer Daniel Lanois playing around with synthesizing his vocals on one of the songs, experimenting with different sounds. Bono seized the opportunity, asking Lanois to distort his vocals on a new song the band had been working on.
Now working in a different voice, Bono was now entirely in character, and proceeded to finish what would become Zoo Station right then and there in the studio.
Zoo Station explosively leads off U2’s career-defining album Achtung Baby and has, over time, come to represent the legendary band’s evolution at a key crossroads.
I am pleased to share that Adam Cheyer, the well-known entrepreneur behind four successful startups which include Siri (sold to Apple in 2010) and Viv Labs (sold to Samsung in 2016), has joined Project Voice Capital Partners as a Venture Partner.
Adam will join us on April 27 to formally announce this partnership, as part of Project Voice 2022 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
(Project Voice 2022 conference program and information is here, registration is here or here, and the adjoining Chattanooga Downtown Marriott booking is here.)
Cheyer will be in attendance on Wednesday (April 27), the final day of the conference, where he’ll attend the voice/AI startup pitch event that morning and take the stage with us later in the day.
I describe Adam as the singular Mount Rushmore of voice/AI. He has had an outsized impact on the evolution of the technology, and has done it while building an equally impressive reputation as a great person and leader.
We’re proud to work with him to find the next great voice/AI companies as well as the investors that will add value while rounding out the fund.
Tomorrow afternoon (Wednesday, April 6), we have a free voice/AI event taking place at San Jose’s trendy Club Auto Sport.
Starting at 1 PM, Cerence, DataForce, and SoundHound will share their recent work with conversational AI and the mobility/automotive space, followed by networking afterward.
We’ve made The Voice of the Car Summit West free to attend while registrations still remain. (You can register here.)
It should be a beautiful day in San Jose and we’d love to see you if you want to come out and join us.