Former Apple’s Siri chief is joining Microsoft’s AI division

After spending nearly one decade, Bill Stasior, the former head of Apple’s Siri division, is joining Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) division. Stasior left Apple in May this year, and now joining Microsoft this month as a corporate vice president. He will be reporting to Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott. Stasior announced his new role in Microsoft, on his personal website on Monday.

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 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.

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.

Stasior is joining Microsoft, but it lagged behind Amazon and Google with respect to consumer AI projects. However, according to a report, he will not be working on Cortana, Microsoft’s own fledging voice assistant. He will be responsible to lead an AI group, though the exact role is not clear.