NORTH POLE HOTLINE

The Concept

Santa Bot is a Santa voice agent for children to call. The agent mimics Santa's mannerisms and picks conversation topics relevant to Santa, Christmas, and the North Pole to keep children entertained.

The twist? The agent is secretly designed to encourage healthy habits through play. Santa Bot embeds conversations about "good deeds" that a child can do to stay on the "nice list" into its engaging chatter about Christmas. This motivates children to keep doing good deeds.

The Approach

I built Santa Bot using a combined LLM + prompt engineering approach through Retell AI Studio for conversational agent creation and GPT-4 for voice chat capabilities. I also leveraged ElevenLabs voice cloning to provide an affective, grandfatherly voice for my Santa bot.

Through rapid iteration and prototyping, I conducted dozens of experiments testing the naturalness, intuitiveness, and affective nature of the system across both "happy path" and adversarial scenarios.

Intuitive Transitions

Rather than immediately accept a child's "No, I don't want a gift," or repeatedly press the same question, the bot applies balanced persistence — it makes a gentle second offer, then gracefully moves on if the child declines again.

Knowing When to End

The original baseline system didn't know when to end a call, endlessly keeping the conversation going even after accomplishing its goals. This led to user fatigue. I modified the conversation flow to add clear markers of what would signal an "end" to the call.