With just two weeks to go until Christmas, a new service is allowing parents to schedule a call between their children and "Santa's elves."
Twilio unveiled its SantaPhone service Monday. Parents can schedule a time to get a call from an elf by providing a phone number and email address through the app's website. The company follows the request up with a text message to confirm the time of the call.
When the time comes, the child gets a call from the North Pole. A bot reading an automated script asks what the child wants for Christmas. The call is automatically recorded for parents and loved ones before it's sent to the email address provided.
"So it's not magic after all," the company said on its website. "It is just an API. But she doesn't need to know that yet."
The service provides a tech update to the classic Christmas wish lists sent to the North Pole each year.
"Santa Claus and his team were relying on communications processes that were literally hundreds of years old," Manav Khurana, Twilio's vice president of product marketing, said in a news release. "Within a couple of days, we were able to set them up with a new method for engaging with children and parents."
Twilio said it is donating $1 to Toys for Tots for each of its first 10,000 calls.
The tech company isn't the only one getting into the holiday spirit. Google's Santa Tracker and the North American Aerospace Defense Command Santa radar went live on Dec. 1.
