Google Tone lets computers talk to each other, literally

Reinventing the acoustic coupled modem of the 1970s, Google engineers have found a way for computers to share data through their speakers. Dubbed Tone, the Chrome app broadcasts the URL of the current tab to any machine within earshot that also has the extension installed. The extension is available now in Chrome's web store. "Tone grew out of the idea that while digital communication methods like email and chat have made it infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to share things with people across the globe, they've actually made it more complicated to share things with the people standing right next to you. Tone aims to make sharing digital things with nearby people as easy as talking to them," Kauffman and Smus said in a blog post.

"Many groups at Google have found that the tradeoffs between ease and reliability worthwhile—it is our hope that small teams, students in classrooms, and families with multiple computers will too," they said. In Mashable's testing, the extension worked surprisingly well — the extension was able to detect the beeps from a nearby laptop even when the sound was coming through headphones. The extension is also able to share to multiple computers at once, provided each one has the extension installed.