With this new dating app, you pick a match by listening to their voice, not viewing their picture - here's how it works

Setting up Waving is easy.

You can either sign in through Facebook, which I did, or with an email address.

Once you sign in, you can set your preferences for potential matches.

In its settings area, you can set your preference for the gender of potential dates, your preferred age range, and the maximum distance geographically you'd like the person to be.

As a test, I set the distance to 1,000 miles, which is the maximum. Because the app is so new and not yet used widely, it only showed me four male potential matches within that 1000-mile radius.

Your profile is built around voice recordings, not photos or text.

Unlike other dating apps, you don't upload your photo to Waving. Instead, you customize your profile by recording yourself saying things.

You can record yourself saying whatever you like and can title each recording as you wish, such as "Hello," "Hobbies," or "Things I Like." For example, I listened to one potential match’s very entertaining review of the most recent Saturday Night Live episode. For now, Waving isn't policing what people say in their recordings or how they label them.

If you want to delete a recording, you just press down on it, and the app will give you the option.

You can view potential matches in the 'Discovery' area

In the app's Discovery area, you'll see the profiles of potential matches, which show their name, age and distance from you. You can also see and play their voice recordings. As with other dating apps, you swipe right if you’re interested and left if you're not.

Listening to other people's voice recordings can be as cringe-inducing as you might imagine. But it was also refreshing to actually hear people putting themselves out there rather than just viewing their profiles. It felt a little like playing back a voicemail from a date whose call you'd missed.

Unfortunately, Waving abandons voice messages as soon as you make a match.

What makes Waving so unique is how it completely shuns photos and visuals in favor of voice. That's why I was disappointed that it abandons voice at a critical point. Once you make a match, you communicate with the person via text chat, not voice.

I wish Waving would have carried its voice recording aspect further and relied on it once you make a match. I think it would have been fun for the app to allow you to swap voice messages with matches or offered some way to talk live with them via some kind of in-app voice-chat feature. Instead, when you communicate with matches, it works just like most other dating apps.

So, I'm deleting Waving. Setting aside the fact that relatively few people use it, I think the company behind Waving needs to better develop the concept of a voice-to-voice dating app. Until then, I'll stick to the traditional photo-based ones.