Twilio, a cloud communications platform, has launched a new service called the Santa Phone Project. As the name suggests, the service lets your child call Santa’s helpers to tell them what they want for Christmas.
The idea is hardly novel — hotlines to Saint Nick have been around for quite some time. Twilio says what makes Santa Phone special is that it’s a “cloud-based service which automatically syncs a phone number with an email address so parents can receive the digital recording of the call.”
It works like this: Head over to SantaPhone.org and type in your contact information. You can schedule a time for the call so you can make sure your children are close by.
You will then get a text with your two-factor authentication code to ensure the entered information is accurate. Once you have verified your information, you can expect a call at the scheduled time.
Twilio says it saves your name, email, and phone number but you can request to delete that information by emailing help@twilio.com. The recording is also saved to “reconcile our records with our carrier partners and audit those records as necessary for tax and accounting purposes.”
After the call starts, Santa’s elves will ask a few questions, including what Christmas presents are on children’s lists. The call is a “machine-read script” that uses Twilio’s text-to-voice technology — meaning your child will be speaking with a chatbot, rather than “an actual person.” When the call ends, you will immediately get a recording of the email which you can play back to jot down the names of everything requested.
The company says it’s donating $1 to Toys for Tots for each of the first 10,000 calls.
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