According to a report by AllThingsD today (those guys are on fire lately), Apple has hired away William Stasior away from Amazon’s A9 project, where he was an executive. Amazon A9 is Amazon’s search and advertising technology department.

Stasior will now be in charge of Apple’s Siri operations, the advanced speech recognition application that comes standard with the iPhone, the third-generation iPad, and the new fifth-generation iPod touch. Siri is also expected to make an appearance on the upcoming iPad mini.

AllThingsD also suspects that this marks a move in Apple towards better competing in the search and search advertising department, something that Apple has previously been lacking in before. Steve Jobs had once famously said that Apple purposely doesn’t do “a lot of things”, talking specifically about search – but it’s worth remembering in the days preceding the iPad mini announcement that Mr. Jobs was also very against 7″ tablets as well.

Via: DaringFireball
Source: AllThingsD