Talk to Santa – An Interactive ChatGPT-Powered App for Kids
Hi HN! Long time lurker, first time poster. I built something that I'm super proud of. I've been super fascinated by voice + AI since Siri and Alexa first launched. Sadly, both of those fell a bit short. With ChatGPT, it seemed like the promise of a fully interactive voice agent was a bit closer. So I built an app that lets kids talk to Santa. The most important part to me was making it feel like a real conversation with low latency. Powered by ChatGPT, Santa is fully interactive. He'll tell stories, answer questions about the North Pole, and even help parents land any message they need help…
In plain words
Talk to Santa is an iOS app that lets children have voice conversations with a ChatGPT-powered Santa character. The app generates interactive responses designed to feel like natural dialogue, enabling Santa to tell stories, answer questions about the North Pole, and deliver parental messages about behavior. Built with a focus on low latency for realistic conversation flow, it targets families looking to create a magical holiday experience for young children.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! Long time lurker, first time poster. I built something that I'm super proud of. I've been super fascinated by voice + AI since Siri and Alexa first launched. Sadly, both of those fell a bit short. With ChatGPT, it seemed like the promise of a fully interactive voice agent was a bit closer. So I built an app that lets kids talk to Santa. The most important part to me was making it feel like a real conversation with low latency. Powered by ChatGPT, Santa is fully interactive. He'll tell stories, answer questions about the North Pole, and even help parents land any message they need help reinforcing (e.g. Go to bed on time, don't hit your brother). My five year old LOVES talking to Santa, and I'm hoping a few other kids out there get to experience the same magic this holiday season. This started as a "I bet I could build it" and "I'm super curious about elixir" -- It's an elixir backend that coordinates between the speech to text API (Google), an LLM (ChatGPT) and a text to speech API (Eleven Labs). We used Membrane as the audio processing framework which gave me a bunch of stuff (voice activity events + coordinating the audio pipelines). The trickiest part was figuring out how to 1) manage the latency across the three APIs but still get Santa to respond in a reasonable timeframe and 2) how to handle an API failures and make sure the conversation recovered. I'm not an engineer by training, much more of a self taught hobbyist. So much of this was hacked together by me reading docs + asking ChatGPT for advice.
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