I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the last thing you need is another messaging app, right? But there’s a new app in the works that you may want to check out anyway. Livetext is a messaging app, but it’s more than that too. It’s also a video chat app, kind of. If you are feeling deprived of a selection of messaging apps, here’s what Livetext has to offer.

Using Livetext

When you are chatting with someone via Livetext, you can see that person in a kind of livestream shott. You can’t actually communicate with someone through video or imaging, but you can take a photo of yourself, and then begin a text conversation. So you will be looking at a live feed of your friend while you text each other on the same screen (the messages are placed over the image).

As you and the person you’re talking to type to each other, those words are displayed in bright and large colors on the screen. Here’s the interesting part - as soon as you send a text message, the words that you type will literally disappear. So you can still look at the livestream of the person you’re talking to, but the words that you type aren’t stored forever until you deleted them. In a way, it’s kind of like SnapChat.

Why the Silent Stream?

It seems kind of odd that you’d want to look at a livestream image of someone without actually being about to use voice to talk to that person, but it has its merits. One of the reasons why you’d want to see someone’s face is because text messages don’t always comes across the way that someone might have intended. That person could be looking at you sincerely or in a concerned way, but the message you read may not come across in that manner. In this way, seeing the person you’re talking to via text is useful.

Behind the App

Yahoo is the company behind the Livetext app. Essentially, the app is a good idea, but it just launched so this means that you may have a tough time finding friends to chat with. The app is also a bit confusing at times, and the app can be really choppy to use. Since it’s new, Yahoo is going to have to work out some of those bugs before the app will work flawlessly. So while you may not want to replace your WhatsApp or SnapChat just yet, Livetext is fun to play around with, and it does let you get a bit silly with the image aspect of it.

Then again, it’s hard to imagine why you wouldn’t just use Skype if you wanted a text and voice combo, or why you’d want to text but not speak to the person that you can clearly see on your screen. But every text app has its merits, and this one will either flop or do wildly well. If you live in the US, you can download Livetext right now. Everyone else will have to wait.