Smartphone Instead of a Book: What Children Are Asking Ded Moroz for in the Era of Voice Assistants

      The annual Santa Claus hotline, which takes children's calls in the days before the New Year, has turned into a large-scale social project. Since the line began operating, children from all over Russia have made more than 560,000 calls, and their number grows rapidly every year.

      This unique channel of communication has become a veritable chronicle of children's wishes. And in 2025 technologies topped the list: by a wide margin the most popular gift remains a smartphone. In second place are traditional toys (dolls, toy cars, construction sets), and in third are dreams of household pets. Interestingly, children ask for a book ten times less often than they ask for a phone. Thousands of children declined to make specific requests, simply asking Santa to "surprise" them.

      Among the standard requests there are also unique stories. Four-year-old Inna from Chita dreams of sambo shoes and rollerblades, six-year-old Arina asks for a guitar, and 14-year-old Mergen from Ulan-Ude hopes to receive two smartphones of the latest model.

      Portrait of the caller

      Analysis showed that the most active interlocutors were children aged 6–10, followed by preschoolers up to five years old. This fact confirms a trend: modern children, members of Generation Alpha (born from 2012 to 2025), not only master technologies easily — they intuitively perceive them as a natural environment for communication. A voice assistant or a "magical" phone number is for them as familiar a way to convey a request as writing a paper letter was for their parents.

      Behind the scenes of the magic: how technologies understand children's speech

      A mass project of this level also became a unique testing ground for technology development. Organizers had to thoroughly train speech recognition and analysis systems so that algorithms could correctly understand high-pitched children's voices, emotional speech, unclear pronunciation of little ones, and regional accents. This not only ensured the operation of the "magical" hotline but also allowed testing of technologies that could potentially be used in educational and service projects for the whole family.

      "This project is more than just creating a holiday," IT-communications experts quoted by the portal volga.news say. "It clearly shows how the familiar format of communication is changing. Children raised among smart speakers and voice assistants naturally transfer this experience to other spheres. For them it is not 'technology' but simply another way to talk to the world. And this trend poses new challenges and opens up opportunities to create inclusive and friendly digital services of the future."

      The geography of the calls covered the whole country. According to statistics, the most active were children from the Moscow region, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar Krai, as well as the Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions.