Yahoo! Livetext

Imagine a video call. Sounds normal right!! Something we regularly do. Now imagine that video call to be mute. I know what you are feeling….WEIRD !!! To make it weirder, think of a mute video with you typing in the text for the communication. This is the new messenger app by Yahoo. Its termed as Yahoo LiveText and after testing it in Hong Kong they have made it available in five countries – USA, UK, Canada, Germany and France.

In the blog post announcing the release Yahoo’s product management senior director, Arjun Sethi, said “Connecting with your friends should be spontaneous, convenient and memorable – but also fleeting, just like a real-life conversation.” A somewhat relevant argument put forward by Yahoo is that to talk on phone, you have to be present in an area where you can actually speak which is not always possible. However there are situations where in you want to do more than just texting while being present in such an area where you can’t speak. Live Text bridges that gap for you. Here is a small video which Yahoo released to show how it looks.

Livetext gives you the feature of giving real time video and you can type over it. To start using the app you need to verify your mobile number and give access to your photos and ofcourse access to your mobile camera. To add contacts who are present on Livetext, you have two options. Either add them by their Livetext ids if you know it or sync all your contacts with the app to find out which all contacts are using Livetext. Rest of the UI is similar to the the other messenger apps in the market. Once the contacts is added or synced, it will appear on the screen with their profile picture and you can start communicating clicking on it.

As soon as you click on a contact to start the chat your video starts and the person on the other end gets a notification that you have started the chat and are typing into it. Once that person joins the video chat, a bar appears on top of your screen informing that the chat is now live. The messages you type appear over the video, all over your friend’s face. You can tap on the screen and instead of the front camera which is used for the video by default, the rear camera starts.

Livetext chat keyboard takes up half of the screen area and also the circle on top which shows your video is neither movable nor big enough to make out what you have captured in the frame. Usually we would dismiss such idea but another thing that’s true is that just the chat sometimes is bit mis-leading. Interpretation becomes easy now that the chat is accompanying your facial expression.

This little experiment Yahoo can catch up and the mobile app developers might get some new idea and come up with something that will catch attention of the smart phone users.