Siri Gets Amazon Exec

 

  • William Stasior
  • From Amazon subsidiary A9
  • Zones in on Siri

William Stasior, the founder and president of Amazon subsidiary A9, is now jumping ship and will head Siri for Apple.

 

  • William Stasior
  • From Amazon subsidiary A9
  • Zones in on Siri

William Stasior, the founder and president of Amazon subsidiary A9, is now jumping ship and will head Siri for Apple.

Stasior is a definite big time in the search and navigation field and has worked for Amazon for 9 years. Amazon A9 handles search and search advertising for the company.

The move came after Siri lost some of its top backbone including co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus who left the company last October, and more recently co-founder Adam Cheyer, earlier this year.

Having a search expert on Siri makes a lot of sense. The feature taps into a number of third-party databases, including Yahoo, Yelp, and Wolfram Alpha, and can also be used to initiate phone features like reminders, timers, and launching apps.

There are also speculation that Apple brought Stasior on-board to go head-to-head with Google. On what exactly? No one knows yet. But given that Google is the search engine god and Stasior is a significant player in that field, it probably will go in this direction.

For the moment though, Stasior will be primarily focused on Siri. It would be interesting to see what he can conjure for this feature.