Apple poaches Amazon's search and navigation chief to run the Siri crew

Apple has bagged the Amazon search and navigation chief, William Stasior, who previously also worked for AltaVista, as the new head of Siri. The natural language voice assistant is still in beta, and Apple apparently has much deeper plans for it than what it is now.

Siri can be found on the iPhone 5 and 4S, the 5th gen iPod touch, and the new iPad. Our own survey a while ago showed that it is not widely used on people's iPhones, since a lot of the questions thrown towards it end up with a web search, and after the initial excitement the actual usage has apparently subsided.

With the hiring of William Stasior from Amazon, Apple is replacing Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus, who are now out of the crew that is developing Siri. Bill Stasior holds a PhD from MIT, and has a really cool binary image of himself on his blog, as you can see in the thumb.