Google Tone will send links to nearby computers using sound

Emailing links to yourself works well -- but seriously, it's old-school and well, boring. Google thinks it can make it more fun.

Emailing links to yourself works well -- but seriously, it's old-school and well, boring. Google thinks it can make it more fun.

It has released a nifty little Chrome extension called Tone. Once you install Tone in your browser and click on the little speaker icon that appears, your computer will emit a little chirrup that will magically transmit the URL of the page you're on to all other computers within earshot that also have the Tone extension installed.

Tone was

inspired

by the fact 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 have actually made it more complicated to share things with the people standing right next to you.'

On the company's blog, Google engineers claim that Tone 'is reliable for short distances in the majority of audio environments even at low volumes.'

In our simple tests in the Hindustan Times newsroom, Tone worked remarkably well, although it sometimes had trouble catching the link if the newsroom was especially noisy. It was also hit and miss if microphones on computers around the machine which was emitting the tone weren't properly configured.

Still, when it does work, it's really, really cool. Give it a spin