Siri hears her new boss is ex-Amazon exec, report says

Apple's Siri voice assistant has a new boss, a report claims.

Apple has hired Bill Stasior, the founder and president of Amazon subsidiary A9, according to All Things Digital.

Stasior spent nearly a decade at Amazon, where he's served as the director of search and navigation, VP of engineering, and more recently president of the company's A9 search technology.

All Things Digital says Apple has tapped Stasior to run Siri, which the company acquired in 2010 and turned into a feature on the iPhone 4S, later adding it to its latest iPod touch and iPad.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation of Stasior's hiring.

Some of the top brass in charge of Siri have left since Apple acquired the company. That includes co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus who left the company last October, and more recently co-founder Adam Cheyer, earlier this year.

The need for search chops on the Siri team makes plenty of sense. The feature is tapped into a number of third-party databases, including Yahoo, Yelp, and Wolfram Alpha, and can also be used to initiate phone features like reminders, timers, and launching apps. Those queries are piped through Apple's servers then fed back to the phone.

Despite lawsuits over the efficacy of the feature aimed in Apple's direction, the company has stated publicly that it has high hopes for Siri. In a talk earlier this year, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook noted that the product was still in beta, but that the company had "a lot of people" working on improving it.