Apple hires Amazon exec to run Siri team

William Stasior, Amazon's Director of Search and Navigation, has just joined Apple. According to AllThingsD, Stasior will take over Apple's Siri unit. Siri is Apple's highly-publicized voice-driven personal assistant that currently ships on the iPhone 5 (and 4S), iPod touch 5th generation, and the new iPad.

Stasior, who brings impressive credentials to the table, will be replacing Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus, who AllThingsD writes, recently left the Siri team.

Siri was first introduced a year ago at the iPhone 4S launch. It remains as a beta product that continues to evolve and develop. Stasior's hiring promises some great possibilities for future growth, especially augmenting Siri's ability to connect to information resources beyond "I'm sorry, I do not understand a topic. Do you want me to search the web for it?"

Stasior holds a PhD from MIT, and worked at AltaVista before moving to Amazon. While at Amazon, he led the team that created core search services.

The ASCII art that appears with this post is from his Binary Bill webpage.