Here's an idea. Let's take that video chatting thing that people do all the time using Skype, Hangouts, or FaceTime, and remove the sound. Huh, Yahoo is already doing that?

Yup, and the service is called Livetext. Yahoo has been testing it in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Ireland. Now the tech company is bringing its intriguing communications platform to five additional countries. There's Canada and the US in North America. France, Germany, and the rest of the UK have joined Ireland in Europe.

In Yahoo's video of Livetext in action, you can see how each sentence you type appears at the bottom of a video feed of whomever you're chatting with. You then get to see how the person reacts to whatever you're saying.

The actor in the demonstration looks lively, but my previous experience typing on keyboards while the webcam is on usually consists of two people staring at their mutual screens, pupils betraying how distracted they are with reading other things in the background. I imagine Livetext recording the ceiling two-thirds of the time while my phone sits on the table waiting for a response.

Yahoo says Livetext saves you from having to be in a location where you can talk aloud. However, it does require you to be in a place with decent lighting. To get around that second hurdle, there's this thing your phone can do called placing calls. Or you can go back to video chatting if you're lucky enough to be audible and visible at the same time.

Source: Yahoo