Google Offers A Call From Santa Via Google Voice

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

According to the December 9, 2010 Google (News - Alert) Blog email, arents can arrange for Santa to call their children with personalized calls with Google Voice, accordingto industry observer Alex Sharp (News - Alert).

The way Smith explains it, anyone can arrange a call for Santa, “and the choices run from standard Santa calls that a parents arranges for a child to fun calls between friends and co-workers. It is not necessary to have a Google Voice to use the free Santa phone service. Santa will be using Google Voice to make calls, and the messages can also be sent by email or posted to Twitter or Facebook (News - Alert).”

To take advantage of the service go to SendaCallfromSanta. “There will be a few lines to fill in with details about the recipient's name, and then there are menus of choices,” Smith says, such as having Santa say he’s been "feeding the reindeer," "learning to juggle," or "updating Twitter" in his voice call.

You can have the call be traditional or humorous, Smith says, and “personalized through details that Santa adds into the call, like knowing your child's grade or favorite food.”

In November TMC’s (News - Alert) Susan J. Campbell wrotethat in August, Google announced that its integration of its Google Voice with Gmail had already hit 1 million customers within 24 hours of the launch. This rapid adoption demonstrated that the demand was definitely there. Not one to only tease customers, Google took its innovation one step further, introducing VoIP call recording by allowing users to record inbound Google Voice calls.

A recent report highlighted the virtues of this addition. This report acknowledged, however, that Google is taking the VoIP call recording one step further by rolling out the features more broadly.

(source: http://small-business-voip.tmcnet.com/topics/small-business-voip/articles/127780-google-offers-call-from-santa-via-google-voice.htm)