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> On models without WiFi it uses sound. The washing machine plays sounds that sound similar to the sounds that acoustic modems made back in the pre-broadband internet days. Their mobile app listens to those and extracts the diagnostics data.

That's actually pretty cool! I think we should use this for more stuff to help usher in the R2-D2 future.

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There was a company called chirp who offered an sdk for this, they also had fun proof of concept apps where you could share arbitrary data to people around you via sound. They eventually got bought by sonos and their offerings vanished...

I don't know how other smart speakers (eg. Google Home/Alexa) do this, but the Yandex Station smart speaker uses this for initial wifi setup. You enter the Wifi password on your phone in their app, then your phone plays a series of sounds in which the SSID and the password are encoded, the speaker listens to that and connects to the network.

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