Bill Stasior, the former head of Apple’s Siri division, is leaving the company after nearly a decade to join Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division, reports The Information. Although Stasior left Apple in May, he’s only joining Microsoft later this month as a corporate vice president, reporting to Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott.
Stasior was with Apple since 2012 and he expanded the team from 70 engineers to more than 1,100 people. He played the leading role in bringing modern machine learning to Siri and Apple. The company said that this year Siri would sound more natural in the forthcoming iOS 13 release.
Microsoft established the AI and research engineering group in 2016. Months later, AI becomes a priority for the company and last year, Microsoft placed AI teams in the group working on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud.
Stasior had the responsibility of running Siri, but Apple effectively tossed executive leadership of the product. Initially, former iOS software chief Scott Forstall was looking after Siri’s developments, later on, Eddy Cue took the charge and then eventually VP of software engineering Craig Federighi. Finally, Giannandrea joined Siri to oversee it, but that seems to have resulted in Stasior’s departure for unknown reasons.
Interestingly, Stasior is joining Microsoft, which despite a robust research division, has also lagged far behind Amazon and Google with respect to consumer AI projects. However, The Information reports Stasior will not in fact be working on Cortana, Microsoft’s own fledging voice assistant that it’s increasingly ignored of late and even in some cases removed from products. Microsoft’s new vision for Cortana is to make it more business-oriented and conversational, apparently. Instead, he’ll be leading up an AI group, although it’s not clear what exactly he’ll be working on.
