Bill Stasior, Apple's VP for Siri steps down from post

Apple's vice president of Siri, Bill Stasior steps down from after seven years of service. According to the Information reported on Friday, "Though Stasior remains in the company, he is no longer heading the voice assistant group, said five people with knowledge of the change".

Bill used to be an Amazon executive who was hired by Apple in 2012 to oversee both search and Siri as VP.

According to a report this happens to be a part of an effort by Apple's Senior Vice President (SVP) of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) strategy John Giannandrea, to strengthen his stronghold on Apple's voice assistant team.

John Giannandrea aims at bringing long-term research-based changes to Siri, other than just focusing on just incremental improvements.

A report added that even though Apple's initial effort to extend Siri to homes through the company's HomePod smart speaker hasn't caught on, Siri still has a powerful distribution channel amongst iPhone. The company could have an opportunity to launch more privacy-focused AI products in comparison to Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant.

So far, Apple hasn't released any official statement or reports of Bill Stasior stepping down.

Siri was announced as a part of iPhone 4S and came into existence as Apple's mainstream voice assistant in 2011.

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