Apple has confirmed that a new leader will be taking over the reins of its artificial intelligence assistant Siri. On Friday, September 1, Apple updated its leadership page where the company announced that Craig Federighi, its Senior Vice President of software, will be in charge of other shifts were also noticed in the updated page. It was seen that new positions were bestowed to Deirdre O'Brien, who will now be serving as the firm’s new head of HR and Isabel Ge Mahe, whose new position places Siri. Apart from Federighi several her as the managing director of the brand in China.
Siri leadership undergoes change
Prior to Federighi taking over, Siri’s development of was spearheaded by Eddy Cue, the senior vice president of Apple’s online services. According to the bio on Apple’s leadership page, Federighi will be overseeing the development of Siri along with macOS and iOS. The teams reporting to Federighi will be responsible for delivering the above-mentioned software to the Cupertino based company’s products, applications, user interface, as well as framework.
The shift in leadership emphasizes on the growing importance of artificial intelligence and the personal assistants that work based on these systems such as Siri, Alexa, or Cortana. All top ranking tech companies have invested in making their own AI assistants.
Google has Google Assistant, Microsoft has Cortana, Apple has Siri, and Amazon has Alexa. Furthermore, in a recent development that took place earlier last week, Amazon and Microsoft have joined hands to let each of its AI assistants speak to one another. In the upcoming future, Alexa and Cortana will be able to converse amongst themselves.
The many hands in charge of Siri
Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010 for an estimated $200 million. In 2011, for the first time, it was included in the user interface of the iPhone 4S. At the time, the domain was headed by Scott Forstall, who in the past looked after the software development for iPad and iPhone, until he left Apple in 2012.
Incidentally, this is the second important project that was taken off Cue’s bio.
For the past couple of years, Cue worked as a dealmaker for Apple’s iTunes and other kinds of online and content services provided by the firm. However, with Tim Cook taking charge of the company, Cue’s profile grew to take charge of software groups, which included Apple Music and Maps. However, starting 2015, Cue stopped looking after the development of Apple’s App Store, which was a big revenue bringer for the company.
