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. Stassior worked at Apple for more than seven years, joining back in 2012.
Stasior’s departure seems less an indictment of the current state of Siri and more a reflection of the reality of AI at Apple. Last year, the iPhone maker poached John Giannandrea from Google, where he was a former head of search and AI. That’s reshaped the way Apple works on AI.
At the time of Giannandrea’s hiring, the move was considered an admission from Apple that its current AI efforts were lackluster and needing revamping, evidenced by Siri falling far behind Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa in sophistication and industry adoption. Despite Siri living inside every iPhone and arriving on the scene before any other major voice assistant, Amazon and Google have led the race in consumer AI by incorporating their respective assistants into smart home products, a sector where Apple has lagged due to its stricter stances on user privacy and its delayed entrance to the smart speaker market.
After Giannandrea took a more hands-on role in the Siri division upon being hired last summer, he was subsequently promoted to a senior vice president role at Apple in December. That meant he was reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook, and he was also responsible for all machine learning and general AI projects at Apple. According to The Information, that promotion resulted in Stasior walking away from day-to-day duties running the Siri team.
Prior to Giannandrea joining, Stasior had the responsibility of running Siri, who was vice president of the division for more than seven years. But Apple effectively tossed executive leadership of the product around like a hot potato. It was initially former iOS software chief Scott Forstall’s job to oversee Siri, but after he left the company unceremoniously over the controversial Apple Maps fiasco, the role went to services chief Eddy Cue and then eventually VP of software engineering Craig Federighi. Finally, when Giannandrea joined, Siri had a proper executive to oversee it, but that seems to have resulted in Stasior’s departure for reasons unknown.
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.
Comments
And the game of musical chairs continues…
By RoboticSpacePenguin on 08.19.19 6:59pm
I don’t know about the musical chair part. But Apple seems a bit desperate when it comes to it’s AI endeavors. They initially thought they could do everything in regards to AI on their iPhones. However they found out that only some AI stuff can exist on smartphones or personal computers in general. But most of the heavy lifting AI stuff requires lots of computing power and big data, that just doesn’t exist on smartphones or personal computing devices. Maybe when our smartphones get a lot more storage in the terabytes area. Then more and more AI stuff can be done locally, with videos and images.
Plus the approach that Apple took with Siri is just stupid. Every other voice platform today has decoupled themselves from every OS, and hardware. That’s why Alexa and Google Assistant can run on $6 boards like the ESP32, or the $10 Raspberry pi Zero W. It’s also why those voice Assistants run on all kinds of home appliances and other hardware. Siri and SiriKit requires iOS apps and Apples Ax SoCs, and to top it off iOS developers still to this day cannot make ANY standalone Siri voice apps for their one and only HomePod. The real problem is Apples Siri and SiriKit are just too restricted and limiting, especially if you compare her to the others. Apple came out with that kludge called Siri Shortcuts, because Siri and SiriKit have too many deficiencies.
By sgodsell on 08.19.19 10:04pm
Siri has always worked in conjunction with the cloud. It has never worked on-device without Internet.
Apple’s on-device AI efforts are actually being followed by everyone now since they all try to include ‘neural engine’ like chips on their devices to speed up processing for machine learning intensive tasks.
By Imran Hussain on 08.19.19 11:02pm
Also, not sure where you see any ‘desperation’ from Apple with its AI efforts. Just because they do things differently than Alexa and Google Assistant doesn’t mean they are desperate. Having your platform work on a $6 board is not an achievement that Apple aims for.
You keep calling Apple ‘desperate’ and ‘scared’ in your comments. This says a lot about how you feel about the company.
By Imran Hussain on 08.19.19 11:04pm
Qualcomm was the first to release an on-chip neural engine with the Snapdragon 820 in 2016. One year after the Snapdragon 820’s release Apple came out with their on-chip neural engine with the A11, so to say that Apple’s "efforts are actually being followed by everyone now" isn’t true.
By IKeepSwitchingBetweeniOSAndAndroid on 08.20.19 12:06am
For Apple, it’s a matter of software + hardware implementation. Just releasing a piece of tech without any usage or adoption doesn’t mean much despite Qualcomm doing it earlier. Android has recently starting focusing on more on-device processing rather than doing everything on the cloud.
By Imran Hussain on 08.20.19 1:50am
To a degree you are right. Apple is not desperate but they are in total disillusionment if they assume their AI platform in relation to Siri will grow unless the company changes its stance on privacy.
The only reason Siri seriously lags behind other platforms is simply because Apple chooses to make a play for privacy and thus put themselves at a disadvantage. Siri seriously lags behind other platform because it has no user data to work with and has remained the same for the past 4-5 years without any notable advancement. All Siri is good for is basic home-kit enabled devices and Apple Music controls.
Shortcuts is a joke as it is really for power users, average people that makes up the bulk of Iphone users barely knows it exists or even uses it. It is a flash in the pan IMHO.
I know some commentators will disagree but all AI experts agree that AI needs data to grow and until Apple makes some changes to that, their AI platform will always be what it is.
I suspect that Apple will make subtle changes to their privacy stance in the coming years if they really expect anything profound to happen.
It is sad in 2019 to ask Siri basic questions and it still has to pull up links to webpages and wikipedia pages.
By Micrones on 08.19.19 11:23pm
And people wonder why we don’t have general AI yet.
By SpinMeAroundTwice on 08.19.19 11:48pm
Ha both of those services suck so that’s going to make no difference.
Google/Amazon have the best voice recognition and AI
By titaniumapple on 08.19.19 7:25pm
It helps to read the article below the headline. And in this case, reading the subheadline was good enough.
By rattletop on 08.19.19 7:57pm
Some can read, but not understand
By llort on 08.19.19 8:03pm
AI goes beyond voice recognition and Alexa/Google Assistant
By NoPokyMe on 08.20.19 12:29am
My dream is for Apple and Google to make up for some bizarre reason and for Google Assistant to become iOS’s voice assistant, with full integration. Siri is so unbelievably bad, and ironically it is also worse when it comes to privacy than Google Assistant.
By IKeepSwitchingBetweeniOSAndAndroid on 08.19.19 8:04pm
All Apple has to do is add in a number of system default settings. So it’s users could easily choose the AI assistant they want to use. That would easily solve a lot of problems, but Apple wants it’s user to use Siri instead, because it’s the default. Android, Windows and other operating systems allow you to use other applications for some system defaults. Apple doesn’t s too afraid of that. Because if they did it for Siri, then things like browsers and messaging apps would follow.
Everyone knows that Apple is scared these days, and likes to control everything.
By sgodsell on 08.19.19 10:09pm
I really hope Apple is someday made to allow users to choose their own (non-limited) default apps, just like Microsoft was made to give users a choice of web browsers on Microsoft Windows.
By IKeepSwitchingBetweeniOSAndAndroid on 08.20.19 12:08am
Username checks out!
By Winklemeier on 08.20.19 11:08am
Siri is the first thing I turn off on my Apple products. Literally has not improved since being introduced ALL the way back on the iPhone 4s.
We need a contextual assistant that learns on the fly, ya know one that mimics an actual assistant. Instead, all we get is yet another tool for the gov’t and friends to spy on us. Yay
By Xevinj on 08.20.19 2:28am
Microsoft’s AI output to date has been pretty good (Cortana, whilst as a product, is certainly a flop, the tech stack underneath (voice synthesis, recognition, etc) was pretty good if rather slow to update) – and Siri, for it’s time, was also a good tech foundation (again, Apple failed to capitalize on this head start in my mind). The challenge Microsoft suffers from for me is that there research departments are very "classical" models – Google develops in the open and gets lots of fanfare as a result along with a strong open source approach resulting in a positive halo effect with lots of consumer applications coming about in return – as oppossed to Microsoft who keeps research in house and generally far more private with a focus on solving enterprise or big science questions – which still results in solid outputs but at a seemingly much slower rate. It’ll be interesting to see where the next few years of AI development takes us.
By AskJarv on 08.20.19 4:03am
Kinda feel like this is more of a loss for Microsoft than a gain… Siri ain’t exactly hot stuff.
By mikedoeslife on 08.20.19 6:48am
AI is being used in other places more than voice assistants. Microsoft is relying on AI heavily for their microsoft graph and Azure. The point is Microsoft stands to gain a lot by investing heavily in AI than Apple. Apple has no presence in the enterprise market which is a huge disadvantage in the long run. AI and enterprise is where the money is. Granted that Apple will continue to make money,I do not see the dominance that Apple used to have unless they release a new product in the likes of Iphone.
By Micrones on 08.20.19 8:54am
.
By boss.king on 08.20.19 8:27am
I’m genuinely not sure Apple is committed to this whole AI project at this point.
They can’t keep senior project leads in place for more than a few years.
By ardent on 08.20.19 10:40am
With the money horde they have, why not just pay people to listen to voice requests?
….wait a minute…
By Winklemeier on 08.20.19 11:09am
That’s really only a small, if crucial, piece of the puzzle. You also need to figure out how to turn that data into usable code engaged in interpreting the intent of notoriously fickle human beings.
By ardent on 08.20.19 12:47pm
Boom ..Siri has been DOA. spy tool
By Xevinj on 08.20.19 2:21pm