| 1 | Yahoo's Livetext app combines traditional text messages with a silent video feed. |
| 2 | Yahoo is quite late to the world of mobile messaging, but you've got to give the company some credit: The new chat service it finally debuted on Wednesday sure is different from the rest of them. |
| 3 | The app, Livetext, combines traditional text messages with a silent video feed between the two people chatting. |
| 4 | You read that right - video, but no sound. |
| 5 | Yahoo says it wants Livetext to be used for quick sessions just like regular texting, but with the emotions conveyed by seeing a person's face. |
| 6 | Eliminating audio means you can use it anywhere - in a meeting, on a noisy street, during class, on a train. |
| 7 | "It's a new way to communicate: casual text on top of video," Arjun Sethi, a senior director of product management at Yahoo and head of the Livetext project, said in an interview. |
| 8 | As Facebook, Google, Tencent and WhatsApp introduced mobile chat apps in recent years and gained hundreds of millions of users, Yahoo floundered in its attempts to update its Yahoo Messenger service, a web service designed a generation ago. |
| 9 | Last year, Yahoo essentially gave up and stopped updating Messenger's mobile apps. |
| 10 | Livetext is something different, based on technology developed by MessageMe, a start-up co-founded by Sethi that was acquired by Yahoo last fall. |
| 11 | It combines elements of video chats with the disappearing nature of Snapchat messages. |
| 12 | "The key thing for us was to make this as simple as possible," said Adam Cahan, Yahoo's senior vice president of video, design and emerging products, in an interview. |
| 13 | As Yahoo developed the product, engineers tested it at Ohio State University and the University of California at Santa Barbara, and also offered it to groups of high school students. |
| 14 | In the last few weeks, the company began offering the app publicly in mobile app stores in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Ireland. |
| 15 | The company was impressed with the results. |
| 16 | "When somebody first tries it, there is a bit of a moment of 'Aha! I didn't expect that,'" Cahan said. |
| 17 | Cahan said the choice to exclude sound, as odd as it appears, was deliberate. |
| 18 | "I can barely ever use a video chat experience," he said. |
| 19 | "I feel like I need to make an appointment with someone." |
| 20 | Silent video, on the other hand, can be used in almost any situation where text chats are possible, with the added bonus of conveying a person's emotions and a sense of place. |
| 21 | Sethi said the company found that video also made chats more memorable by associating them with a person's face. |
| 22 | Video isn't saved on the phone or by Yahoo. |
| 23 | And unlike competing products such as Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, the texts disappear once the chat session is ended. |
| 24 | The app will be released in iOS and Android app stores on Thursday in the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany and France. |
| 25 | Yahoo has not yet detailed plans to bring it to Australia. |
| 26 | Sethi acknowledged that users have many messaging apps to choose from. |
| 27 | "Is this a new form of communication? Have we hit the opportunity well?" he said. |