DENVER — Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated computer service, is enlisting in the military-run program that takes phone calls from children asking when Santa will arrive on Christmas Eve.
NORAD Tracks Santa will go live on Sunday with 1,500 volunteers answering calls at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Updates also will be posted on social media and at noradsanta.org.
And if you have Amazon’s Echo device, you can ask Alexa, once you enable the function.
The Santa tracker started in 1955 when a newspaper ad invited kids to call Santa but mistakenly listed the phone number for a hotline to a military control room.
Last year, NORAD Tracks Santa got nearly 154,200 phone calls and 10.7 million unique website visitors. It also snared 1.8 million followers on Facebook and 177,000 on Twitter.