Apple executives quit amid reshuffle in Siri team

Two Apple executives, Vipul Ved Prakash and Tom Gruber, have quit amid a reshuffling of the company’s Siri team.

According to an Economic Times report, Prakash was the Head of Search and Gruber was the Head of Siri's Advanced Development Group.

Apple has confirmed the departures of both the members.

According to the report, Gruber was one of the co-founders of the voice assistant, now ubiquitous with Apple products. Gruber looks to pursue his non-professional interests in photography and ocean conservation.

Prakash was the former CEO of search engine Topsy. He joined Apple in 2013 after Topsy was taken over by the company. The report stated the company was shut down after two years of its operations after it was acquired by Apple with a price tag upwards of $224 million.

Apple has been investing in the Siri brand to compete directly with Google and Amazon’s voice assistant products Google home and Alexa respectively.

In line with its plans, Apple made ex-Google executive John Giannandrea its Chief of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy.

He will be leading Apple's core ML team, its ML division, and Siri.

The report also stated Apple lags others in AI areas like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and features needed to expand the capabilities of Siri.