After several weeks of speculation and leaked details, Google officially unveiled its first big foray into mobile payments in Asia. The Android and search giant has launched Tez, a free mobile wallet in India that will let users link up their phones to their bank accounts to pay for goods securely in physical stores and online, and for person-to-person money transfers with a new twist: Audio QR, which uses ultrasonic sounds to let you exchange money, bypassing any need for NFC.

“Send money home to your family, split a dinner bill with

friends, or pay the neighbourhood chaiwala. Make all payments big or small, directly from your bank account with Tez, Google’s new digital payment app for India,” Google notes in its information portal about the new app. Tez is Google’s play to replace cash transactions and become a more central part of how people pay for things, using their mobile to do so. But it’s also a chance for the company to push out some new technologies — like audio QR(AQR), which lets users transfer money by letting their phones speak to each other with sounds — to see how it can make that process more frictionless, and therefore more attractive to use than cash itself. More on AQR below. Tez is launching today on iOS and Android in the country and Google linking up with several major banks in the country by way of UPI(Unified Payments Interface)

— a payment standard and system backed by the government in its push to bring more integrated banking services into a very fragmented market. Google has confirmed to me that payments made and taken using UPI are free for consumers and small merchants. “Google is not collecting any payments from transactions,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. It is unclear how and if that will change when Google turns on functionality to upload cards to the Tez wallet, which is coming “in the next few weeks and months.” Card usage could come with a transaction fee. To be clear, Tez is not a mobile “wallet” in the same way as PayTM offers a mobile wallet, where money is stored in the app and needs to be topped up to be used; it’s more like Apple’s Wallet or other mobile wallets in the west: a place that links up your phone with your bank accounts to let you use your phone as a way to deduct payments from those accounts. The other thing is that it makes any kind of contactless transaction with the device fairly flexible and easy. Services like Airdrop on iPhones require Bluetooth and if you’ve used it before isn’t that seamless and foolproof to turn on(even though it works like a charm when it does). QR codes, meanwhile, require you to turn on the camera on your device and physically align it with a code on another screen, a potentially fiddly and difficult process.