GMAIL: Send a personalized Phone Call from Santa | Hacker News Reader

GMAIL: Send a personalized Phone Call from Santa

sendacallfromsanta.com

12 pointsequilibrium14 comments

This is very creative, but be aware this isn't a Google product. A couple observations:

1) Making the TOS presented so prominently is a bit surprising and imposing. Their placement makes me wonder whether this is a cute, harmless gift or something worse. I know Google's "Don't Be Evil," but this site is run by someone else...

2) This isn't Google. This is some company that Google's marketing department contracted. If you look at the source page, you see this is running on stock AWS and might even have been an "off-the-shelf" solution Google added their name to.

While I have faith Google set up a reasonable contract to protect my info, I don't know or trust the third party to handle my information properly.

3) Maybe it's the geek in me, but I'd be 100x more excited if some employees put this together during their 20% time. Seeing that it's clearly a marketing bit end-to-end means I almost don't want to share it with friends.

4) It would have been nice to download the MP3 and send it over email myself. A phone call is a nice way to advertise Google Voice, but it sure is hard to share with friends and family after the event.

5) Related to the MP3, it doesn't include any of the advertising or promotional messaging I would expect during the preview. I would like to know the entire experience I'm sending to my loved one, not just the personalized message. If it requires my loved one to submit an email address or listen to 30 second advertising, I may not want my loved one to hear it. This may be undue paranoia, but I feel like I've had to keep my guard up with marketing companies.

Net: A cool, creative idea but overall underwhelmed by the execution and unlikely to use in practice.

It should have mentioned in the beginning that it's for US and Canada only. After going through many steps, I'm stuck at delivering it since it's only available for those two countries.

This might be a little excessive just to get a call from santa, but it might work if you create a Google Voice account with a U.S. number, but have it linked to your real phone. Then enter the Google Voice number to be called.

Very annoying they show the restriction on the last page of a fairly lengthy multi-page form.

Very annoying for those of us in Australia. I'd even pay a couple of dollars to make it work at this point, the call sounded great.

I love the idea, but I can't help but thinking this would work so much better if the UI was better designed and aimed more at children...

wink wink twilio.com

My first thought was along the lines of someone could put together a much better interface for this and integrate it with Twilio. The Twilio part would take no time at all. The only real problem is recording all of the names. It's really too bad that the text to speech voices used by Twilio are so terrible. I'm really surprised they haven't looked at using some third party tech for that like the voices provided by Cepstral (http://cepstral.com/) or others.

We have, and we're working to make it better. For something like this you could use any engine you want as long as it generates wav or mp3 files.

I have occasionally seen other parents take the Santa thing to the next level with these personalized services. One even paid a Santa to show up on Xmas day. In all cases the questioning and obvious suspicions generated from the kids almost resulted in a backfire. For me it proves Neil De Grasse Tyson's assertion that "children are born scientists". Best not to give them too much evidence to start analyzing.

So if I could offer a piece of unsolicited advice: keep it unreal, magical and mysterious and stick with the whole down-the-chimney thing.

Does anyone know if it calls immediately or can a time be scheduled? I'm at the form where you enter the phone numbers and I don't want it to wake anyone up.

Edit: Never mind. I filled out another one to send to my dog (lol) and got the message: "Santa can't call that number right now because Dudley is probably sleeping. Please try again after 8am in their time zone." I guess I'll leave the original tab open for a few hours.

I like this idea; it's really cute, but it asks a few too many personal questions just to make a phone call. It made me a bit uncomfortable a few pages in.

After I fnish the hole think I get "Oops! Santa can only make calls with valid North American phone numbers."

Now that is incredible poor user experience !

Can't find my niece's name, Annie. Not exactly a rare name. Lots of obscure ones. Oddly, it's not there.

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