Pain au Chocolat or Chocolatine? The Lorin Brothers and Twilio Voice AI Settle France's Classic Culinary Debate

Paris, October 15, 2026 Twilio (NYSE:TWLO), the infrastructure for customer engagement in the AI era, today announced that the creators of the Baguette Index have used its infrastructure to settle France's iconic pain au chocolat vs chocolatine debate. Brothers Charles and Louis-Marie Lorin placed thousands of calls to bakeries across France to gather data for their new Ligne Chocolatine Index. They will both present at Twilio's SIGNAL Paris on October 15, sharing their approach and the technology behind this new Index.

Pain au chocolat or chocolatine? Few debates spark such regional fervor in France. People defend their word the way they'd defend their hometown, their rugby scrum, or their football club. Maps based on self-reported surveys have circulated on social media for years, with little to no grounding as to the actual facts.

Charles and Louis-Marie Lorin wanted to take this debate out of the realm of opinion and into the realm of measurement. Rather than a self-reported survey, they had a Voice AI agent, built on Twilio Programmable Voice, call tens of thousands of bakeries to listen to what the person who picks up the phone actually says.

The tipping line, finally measured

For years, France relied on the theoretical line established by linguist Mathieu Avanzi in his Atlas du français de nos régions (2017) to map where pain au chocolat ends and chocolatine begins. Twilio Voice AI challenged this theory.

By calling thousands of bakeries nationwide, the new Index revealed that the actual divide sits nearly 22 km further southwest than Avanzi mapped, showing pain au chocolat pushing deeper into Southwest territory. Ground data also proved that linguistic borders are rarely watertight. A few rebels still hold out: isolated chocolatine bakeries in Île d'Yeu, in Chinon and in Torcy, while Hauts-de-France ignores the debate altogether in favor of a third term: petit pain

"After the price of the baguette, we wanted to tackle an even more passionate debate: which word people actually use at the counter. By integrating programmable voice tools with conversational AI models, we successfully scaled our initial proof-of-concept into a nationwide data index," explains Charles Lorin, Co-founder of the Index.

The recipe: how it was made

Starting from a directory of thousands of bakeries built via Apify, the Lorin brothers selected establishments located around the linguistic border to test. They then launched calls in batches using Twilio Programmable Voice. This technology allowed their custom voice agent, Brigitte, to hold a natural conversation with each person and note the term they used.

Each transcript was then analyzed to keep only the words actually spoken by the person on the phone, disregarding any suggested by the agent. There were enough responses to map the border with unprecedented precision, without ever setting foot in the field.

The findings illustrate a broader capability: voice AI today makes it possible to extract information directly from thousands of real conversations and turn those exchanges into usable data at scale, at a cost and speed that traditional survey methods simply can't match.

"The Ligne Chocolatine Index shows the art of what's possible with conversational AI. Twilio is arming developers with the infrastructure to not only experiment with AI, but to build real applications that turn conversations into valuable and intelligent interactions." says Peter Bell, Vice President of Marketing EMEA at Twilio.

The interactive map and full results are available at https://lebaguetteindex.fr/chocolatine/.

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