[WalterBright]

I've never been in an elevator that announced the floors with anything better than a ping. This is despite elevators being controlled by single board computers since around 1980.

The buttons have had braille on them for a long time.

[Piskvorrr]

Interesting. OTOH, while old builds here (electromechanical, no microcontrollers, <1990) lack even the basic ping, I haven't been in an elevator built in the new millenium which wasn't excessively chatty. (Central Europe mostly, but the same experience everywhere I went: "ground floor, main entrance, access to train station; mind the door; door is opening")

[andrewshadura]

Interesting you say that, literally every lift in a public space that does any sound at all around here announces each floor with proper spoken speech, not just a ping.

[badsectoracula]

I wonder if it is due to some ancient regulation mandating rings/pings that nobody bothered to update for current tech. When i lived in Warsaw (Poland) for a while, every single elevator i came across - including those in very old buildings - had voice recordings for announcing the current floor. I almost learned polish numbers from them :-P

[bobthepanda]

In a lot of modern buildings in Hong Kong, lifts announce floors in three languages: English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.

I'd imagine in Macau, they might use four (those three plus Portuguese); the public transit stop announcements do, and quite frankly I'm not sure how they guarantee that they can complete the announcements before the next stop.

[burfog]

At that point, just use Morse code. For small buildings, the cuckoo clock method works too.

[bobthepanda]

the main reason why elevators in Hong Kong do not is that most of them are high speed high-rise elevators and the numbers just whip by. It would probably be very frantic sounding to use Morse if you went from ground to 50 in less than a minute.

Instead they only announces floors that are stopped on, so this works fine.

One benefit of using spoken vernaculars rather than Morse is that Morse has to be taught; Hong Kong historically draws large portions of its population from migrants originating from all over China, where until recently there was wide variance in schooling and literacy rates.

[vidarh]

I know of at least a few in London office buildings that speak. Especially buildings with large banks of elevators that tends to have "fancier" control systems that manage all of the elevators.

[apetresc]

Canadian here - even my condo building elevator announces floor numbers with a (pretty well-digitized) voice. And believe me, my building is no marvel of modernity.

[andrewshadura]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzCdkkG4Gnk

[neltnerb]

I haven't seen taking ones a ton, outside of hotels and fairly new conference centers and the like.