>Amazon buys text-to-speech software company Ivona

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-ivona/amazon-buys-...

>Amazon to acquire Yap, move into speech recognition?

https://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2550764/amazon-acquires-y...

>Amazon has reportedly acquired Evi for voice-guided search

https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-17-amazon-may-have-quietly-...

> They did NLP + Echo + Alexa in house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_(software)

Your parent is specifically talking about greenfield projects that are not customer facing. Alexa/Echo is customer facing.

That’s customer facing. Read my comment again. I’m talking about non-customer facing / utilitarian technology that is used to facilitate their customer facing services and products.

Annapurna is customer facing now with Graviton. Also, we don't know how much they invest after acquisition.

I think Annapurna was more strategic than you think.

* James Hamilton in 2010: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/10/datacenter-network...

* Annapurna acquired in 2015.

* In 2017 they reveal that every EC2 server has a Nitro (Annapurna) chip for networking: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...

Yeah. I guess you could say that’s customer facing. In any case is not a purely customer-facing acquisition like for example AWS acquiring Cloud9 so they could offer a Web IDE.

Chips are peculiar because they matter a lot in a customer facing way but they are not a 100% transparent feature. I think AWS customers couldn’t care less what their instances are powered by as long as they are 1) Fast 2) Cheap 3) Secure. But the chip happens to influence those things heavily, so they become almost like referential values to aggregate those characteristics in a way that’s easy to market.

Those are customer facing mostly no?