

GMAIL: Send a personalized Phone Call from Santa  - equilibrium
http://www.sendacallfromsanta.com/ 

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yajoe
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.

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wiradikusuma
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.

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firefoxman1
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.

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veb
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...

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johns
wink wink twilio.com

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ktsmith
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.

~~~
johns
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.

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thegarym
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.

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tfb
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.

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Greenisus
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.

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Balauru
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 !

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

