Apple recently hired William Stasior to run the Siri unit. Stasior is a major Amazon executive and prominent search technologist according to sources. At Amazon, Stasior has been in charge of A9, which is Amazon’s search and search advertising unit. For those who didn't know, Stasior is the former AltaVista executive who co-founded the independent company and has run it since Udi Manber left for Google.
Stasior will now be in charge of Siri, which is Apple’s famous voice-activated personal-assistant program. The tech giant previously acquired Siri in April of 2010 in order to invest in voice-activated search for its iOS devices and although Siri was a high profile hit for the iPhone, much of the talent who helped create it left Apple. This includes Adam Cheyer, who co-founded the voice recognition software company prior to its acquisition and CEO Dag Kittlaus, who departed in October of 2011.
The most interesting part about this is the fact that Stasior is likely to find himself focusing on strengthening Apple’s search and search advertising technology as Apple and Google compete with one another in the space. The battle between the two is increasing as Apple recently tossed Google’s mapping technology from the latest version of its iOS 6 operating system and could eventually remove it as a search option as well on its iOS devices.
Amazon had no comments on Stasior’s departure but we can all look forward to progress being made with search as a whole going forward.
Source: AllThingsD
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