Call Santa

Call Santa was designed to deliver a magical yet technologically advanced holiday experience. The platform allows parents to create accounts, add one or multiple children, and input personalized details such as name, age, preferred language, and even special gift wishes. During the live call, Santa references these details dynamically, making the interaction feel authentic and uniquely tailored.

The system supports more than 30 languages and runs entirely in the browser, no app installation required. It operates on a flexible credit-based pricing model rather than subscriptions, allowing families to purchase talk time as needed.

We were responsible for building the full product, from frontend and backend architecture to AI orchestration and payment integration, within an exceptionally short timeline.

The primary challenge was making Santa feel truly real during a live AI-powered video call.

Unlike text-based AI tools, this experience required:

    🔹 Real-time conversational flow

    🔹 Natural voice response without awkward delays

    🔹 Smooth conversational turn-taking

    🔹 Synchronized lip movements

    🔹 Minimal latency between user input and AI response

The difficulty lay in orchestrating speech recognition, large language model processing, voice generation, and animated video output in a seamless loop. Even small delays or unnatural pauses would break immersion for children.

To create natural conversational flow, we implemented a real-time generative AI pipeline combining:

    🔹 Speech-to-text processing

    🔹 Large Language Model reasoning

    🔹 AI voice synthesis

    🔹 Video animation synchronization

One key innovation involved defining Santa’s “closed mouth” state as the system’s silence trigger. When Santa’s lips were closed, the system interpreted it as the listening phase. This allowed us to manage conversational turns more naturally and reduce overlapping speech.

We optimized lip-sync timing to align closely with generated audio waveforms, making Santa’s mouth movements as synchronized and natural as possible. Latency was reduced through streamlined AI orchestration, ensuring fluid back-and-forth dialogue.

The result was a responsive and emotionally engaging AI character capable of maintaining real-time conversations.

The project was completed in just one month by one Full Stack Developer

Despite the tight timeline, we delivered a fully functional MVP that included:

    🔹 Parent account creation

    🔹 Child profile personalization

    🔹 Real-time AI video calls

    🔹 Multi-language support (30+ languages)

    🔹 Credit-based billing system

    🔹 Stripe payment integration

Technology & Architecture

The development process focused on rapid iteration, performance testing, and real-time optimization. Given the project’s proof-of-concept nature, speed to market was critical.

    🔹 Frontend: Next.js (high-performance React framework for real-time UI rendering)

    🔹 Database: PostgreSQL

    🔹 Payment: Stripe (credit-based transaction system)

AI Integration:

    🔹 GPT-4 (Generative AI for conversational reasoning)

    🔹 ElevenLabs (Neural Text-to-Speech synthesis)

    🔹 Real-time Speech-to-Text processing

    🔹 Conversational AI orchestration (multi-step generative AI pipeline)

    🔹 Live AI-powered two-way video conversations with Santa

    🔹 Deep personalization based on child profile inputs

    🔹 Credit-based pricing system with Stripe integration

    🔹 Browser-based access (no app download required)

    🔹 Multi-language support (30+ languages)

Call Santa successfully launched as a fully operational product within just one month and it already had its registered users.

Key outcomes:

    🔹 Live platform with registered users

    🔹 Functional real-time AI video conversations

    🔹 Successful payment and credit system implementation

    🔹 Multi-language accessibility for global users

The project served as a powerful proof of concept, demonstrating that a real-time AI video interaction product could be built, launched, and validated rapidly. We are proud to say that it worked.