“Bill Stasior, who was lured from Amazon in 2012 to lead Siri after two of the personal digital assistant’s creators left Apple, is no longer heading the voice assistant group, though he remains at the tech giant, according to a report at The Information, citing unnamed ‘people familiar with the matter,'” Dennis Sellers reports for Apple World Today.
“Stasior was previously attached to Amazon’s A9 search arm,” Sellers reports. “He came to Apple in 2012 to oversee Siri following the departure of Siri co-founders Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus.”
Sellers reports, “The article adds that the change appears to be part of an effort by John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, ‘to put more of his own stamp on the group responsible for Apple’s voice assistant.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, this time’s the charm. Go, John, Go!
SEE ALSO:
AI guru John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team – December 20, 2018
Former Apple employees on Eddy Cue: Siri and Eddy were ‘a bad fit’ – September 5, 2018
Apple’s Siri improved by 11 percentage points in correct answers over the last 15 months – July 25, 2018
Apple combines machine learning and Siri teams under John Giannandrea – July 10, 2018
Apple’s ‘personal assistant activation’ patent application hints at improved Siri – May 10, 2018
iOS 11.4 will allow Siri to recognize AirPlay commands – May 3, 2018
iPhone X owners are extremely satisfied with basically everything except Siri – April 20, 2018
Apple’s Siri, HomePod and the voice assistant showdown – April 6, 2018
Apple’s A.I. efforts get shot of adrenaline with Giannandrea coup – April 6, 2018
A.I. defector gives Apple access to Google’s secrets – April 6, 2018
Gene Munster: Poaching AI chief John Giannandrea from Google a win for Apple – April 5, 2018
Apple hires Google’s A.I. chief to improve Siri – April 4, 2018
Apple hires Amazon A9 exec Stasior to run Siri unit – October 15, 2012
If SIRI were a human being, it would be diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome.
Yeah, it might one day be able to perform rudimentary functions in society (live in a group home and bag groceries at the local market), but of course it will never be in a capacity to compete with the best and brightest.
The truly astounding part of this story is that Jobs gave Cook at least a 6-year lead on the competition and he still pissed it all away. It not only speaks volumes to Cook’s innate character traits of being lazy and incompetent, but his total apathy in regards to Apple’s future is only exceeded by his supernatural lust for greed.
Mr Zero, it appears you have Hatred Syndrome
@ripcity:
Zero exaggerates massively and with poor tact but unfortunately, he’s basing his commentary on the truth. Those who level personal attacks on him, interestingly, offer zero proof that Apple isn’t as he describes.
I have given up completely on Siri. It is permanently off on all my devices. It’s truly not a time saver to have to repeatedly correct an “assistant” that is dumber than a box of rocks. Also as a matter of courtesy, it’s extremely rude to talk loudly at Siri in a public space. So while it’s obvious Apple wants to be the company that miniaturizes the iPhone to become screen-less wearables, Apple has actually proven instead that it’s not making good progress in that direction. Apple isn’t successfully replacing touch and feel with voice commands. Those who want to get things done will always want precision and context that cannot be gained with Messages or Facetime or Watches or Siri. They use Macs. Of course, productive people are sick and tired of Apple’s retreat from making complete always-visible user configurable toolbars for one-click functionality on Mac. It is apparently too hard for Apple and other companies to offer anymore??? Nevertheless, even a few clicks on a Mac or imprecise smudges on your greasy iPhone screen is faster than dealing with Siri ever will be.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not deifying Jobs, all his online initiatives totally sucked too, but at least he offered reliable quality PC hardware and software at mostly reasonable prices, no gimmicks, no subscriptions, no consistently massive overcharging for hardware to cover the costs of intermittently updated freebieware.
Anyone who enjoyed the 2nd golden era of Apple (roughly 2001-2011) finds the current Apple attention to detail, care for the customer, and pricing to be bad and getting worse. Siri is just one example of a product that hardware buyers subsidize without seeing the fruits of their expensive investments. Every competitor seems to show steady improvement, but Siri continues to flounder. Even fanboys like yojimbo can’t rely on Siri or even Apple’s spellcheckers (not to mention maps, translations, etc) because they are truly shoddy. And by shoddy, I don’t mean not number 1. I mean if you attempted to rely 100% on Apple software without manually picking up the slack with workarounds, dongles, kludges, and fixes that Apple should have gotten right the first time, then you would look like an idiot. Try it yourself: dictate a letter to your boss using Siri. By the time you correct the gross errors, you might as well have built your own typewriter. And since you have to properly retype everything, then what was the point of Siri? The spelling and grammar checker on Microsoft Word from 20 years ago performs better than anything Apple has released since.
Zero does Apple a service to speak the truth to the out-of-touch bozos in the executive suites at the Warriors basketball games or wherever they hang out now. Unfortunately, Apple has a culture today of making “good enough” profits rather than truly great products.
@Mike 👍
Although my posts can at times seem like hyperbole and gross exaggeration, most times I just barely skim the surface, because Cook’s litany of fuckups is actually hard for even me to believe, let alone fully drill down into.
ZeroR… I have no indication that Tim C is lazy, but I do wonder about his interpretation of reality. Any CEO that stalls production of a major product/bread/butter (MAC Pro) for 5+ years, w/o satisfying business rationale, has issues. The real klunker in that story is five years into the delay, his team decides it’s important to talk to the community who uses the product to determine what they really want/need. Tone deaf. Out of step. Living in his own stratified air. Absolutely no excuse. I’m not a pro user by the way.
@Ronner
“Lazy” is the only word in the English language to describe Cook’s willful inaction and apathy when it comes to keeping Mac hardware updated in a reasonably, timely manner (as well as the legion of other duties as CEO that he has ignored for 8-years).
After 8-years, a comprehensive analysis of all Cook’s foibles couldn’t even be contained to one book… it would require volumes, like an encyclopedia.
“The real clunker in that story is five years into the delay, his team decides it’s important to talk to the community who uses the product to determine what they really want/need.”
Well, perhaps Cook does indeed lack the vision. When it comes to the technology and innovation, he lacks the deep understanding of the technological aspects of the Apple products, making him incapable of exercising the forward vision, not knowing what to do, running left and right. That’s one of the reasons why he concentrates so much on consumer gadgets like the phone and tablets etc.
Consulting with the community and demographics? A good attitude but 5 years too late. Does he want to see what the people want?
Here is to Tim Cook and his forward vision (or lack thereof): This was what was making Apple Apple.
Steve Jobs’ quotes
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. – Steve Jobs (and Cook should know better than people)
We built [the Mac] for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. – Steve Jobs
Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. – Steve Jobs at the unveiling of iPhone
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. – Wayne Gretzky
Somebody needs to be fired over Siri. Even the name means “ass end” in Japanese. For me, it’s as useless as tits on a boar hog.
Totally agree with Orenokoto. Apple should have kept Scott Forestall.
You got a love it corporate America protects their own at the headquarters level. If they could’ve attributed it to a lower level employee that person would’ve been fired immediately. Siri sucks and has Since it was released. In fairness it may have improved a little bit however google Amazon so much further ahead. Apples issue lack of attention to detail in every facet of the company.
Apple is all about rental music, making TV shows (someday, maybe), putting ads on the app store, letting Mac HW languish and cranking every price toward the stratosphere.
The future is being made, but not on the Macintosh and that is a damned shame. The OS and components (to include Siri) see to get worse instead of better. Not sure who is in charge of tying all this stuff together, but a lot of iOS and Mac draw from the same cloud databases and they are not getting better.
Search for files on your Mac is not as good as it was a decade ago and the Internet interface is marginal at best. Spell check is awful and Siri is just a dumpster fire in an earthquake with a tsunami rolling in. Airplay from my iPhone XS to my Apple TV 4K running current SW is not as good as it was a couple of years ago.
Apple once slowed development of Mac OS down and spent an entire cycle killing bugs and improving the way things worked and it created Snow Leopard which is the finest version of the Macintosh OS to have ever shipped. Maybe Apple should take a while cycle of all the OSes and services and concentrate on interoperability, accuracy of search, better voice recognition, stability and security.
Given the mountain of cash Apple’s operations currently throw off and the massive headcount, they cannot claim they lack the resources to take on such a task. All that stands between such a project and it becoming reality is a commitment from Mr Cook and a release of the resources to make it happen.
Maybe they can lure Bertrand Serlet or Avie Tevanian back to head the project- both are in their late 50’s, so they are not too old. Maybe Scott Forstall would like a crack at redemption within Apple.
The bottom line is that Apple is letting the technologies that make a large part of all OSes fall behind and are not best in class. Further they do not play together in a way where “it just works”.
Hear! Hear!
Perhaps Mr.Cook is all about the iPhone/iPad/iOS (which he understands as a consumer) and a worn-out calculator busy at work.
If he is a true and avid user of his own products, I doubt he would miss any of those sorry states of his product lines. Sometimes, I have to wonder…… Scott Forstall? Probably far better than the current CEO. I can’t think a person like Scott would miss the failing Siri and some others that are falling way behind the competitors.
Tim Cook, definitely not an innovator but a follower. I am sure there must be far superior talents among the 13,000 or so high-powered employees in the Spaceship (but probably suppressed by Cook).