Comment by WalterBright
1 day ago
Boeing found out the problem with "beeping" alarms.
The first time they installed a warning horn, I think it was the stall warning, it was a big success. So, they started adding different horns for other situations. At one point, in an emergency, the pilot got confused about which horn meant what, and had an accident.
So now, Boeing replaced horns with a voice, like "pull up". Sounds obvious, right?
But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.
Decades ago, I wondered why elevators announced floors with a beep. If you're blind, you have no idea what floor you're on. I thought a voice would be better. 50 years later, I heard some elevators announce the floor with a voice.
P.S. It's not a technology issue. The IBM PC had an I/O port wired to the speaker. You could give the speaker +5V or 0V, making a square wave only, an annoying buzzing sound. But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.
P.P.S. My furnace gives its status in the form of a blinking LED. A fast blink means broken, slower blink means A-OK. Of course, when you're faced with a blinking LED, is it blinking fast or slow?
My parents’ ‘80s Chrysler New Yorker would talk instead of beep. ‘A door is ajar,” it would say, and we would giggle, ‘no, a door is a door!’ After Kitt in Nightrider, car companies wanted to be cool.
https://youtube.com/shorts/IhSrmB2qCdY?is=vg47_htvXpXS2ElU
Eddie Murphy had a great comedy bit based on that car.
> But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.
Can't speak to all vehicles, but my VW ID3 clearly indicates what the issue is on the dashboard.
So if it's the lane-keeping assist it highlights which lane(s) it is monitoring and it provides a written prompt on screen (e.g. "drive in the centre of the lane") if it's not happy.
If the speed limiter is on it shows the current signed speed limit in the dashboard and it flashes that speed limit if I am driving over the speed limit.
If the car believes I am not concentrating on the road and instead interacting too much with the touch-screen it puts a large warning in the middle of the touchscreen to pay attention to the road and prevents me using the infotainment system for a few second.
I'd be surprised if most other modern/new cars didn't also include instrument display feedback like this alongside audible warnings.
You’d be surprised. A family member bought a 2025 utilitarian car (Dacia). It’s the one on the newer platform (Clio 6) so they can implement all the beeping mandated by law.
The car beeps exactly the same way whatever the reason so you can’t tell why. It even beeps when it thinks the speed limit has changed (up or down)… it’s infuriating to drive this car, there is a beep about something every minute or two. You can’t even tell what it’s beeping about.
Luckily there is a shortcut button near the dash that you can press to disable all these idiotic beeps. You have to do it every time you restart the car. It does make it feel like all these beeps are pointless since you can’t tell what they’re about and press the button to disable them all as soon as you start the car anyway…
That does sound pretty poor, surprised it's not mandated that there needs to be an onscreen warning as well, not just an unexplained beep.
For my experience i've found the safety features helpful and don't mind them. I turn off the audible warning but the onscreen warnings are helpful nudges/reminders.
The lane-assist bit I leave on and whilst I do occasionally have to 'wrestle' with the car a little in some scenarios, it doesn't ever feel like I lose control I just have to overcome a little bit more resistance when the system is concerned about me departing the lane inadvertently. For me that's not really a problem, but I do see how others might find it frustrating.
Reminds me of the tensest moment in my first month driving and with a brand new car too.
I started driving and something beeped. I was in pretty thick traffic at the time so I nervously (I can't emphasize this enough) found a quieter side road to troubleshoot.
I think there was also an indicator on the dashboard to couple with the beep but if it did, the icon representation left much for guesswork. After about five minutes rifling through the manual, I figured out the car was telling me the handbrake was not fully disengaged.
It's not as catastrophic as it sounds---the car drove smoothly when I started it. I was only off by a few millimeters. The way I disengaged the handbrake at the time padded my knuckles between the lever and the panel, leading to a gap from full disengagement.
I would still be confused in traffic had I known what the issue was from the get-go but I would also be way less nervous. The kind of nerves a rookie driver could really do away with. I could've addressed that problem on a red light.
I've gotten beeps and something flashed on the instrument panel, but when I focused my eyes on the instrument panel, it was gone.
Freakin' useless.
A better user interface would be to have the whole panel turn red when you're about to hit something.
I with my car had an accessible log of these notices. Another example, my car gives you a safety score at the end of every drive, out of 100. When I get less than 100, there's no information about what I might do to improve my score, and ostensibly, drive more safely.
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Freakin useless is hiding OBD codes.
Class D amplifiers use that same trick, just at much higher switching frequencies (pushing quantization noise ultrasonic, where it can be filtered). Since transistors are most efficient when fully on/off, very little power is wasted as heat. That's what made the modern revolution in tiny amps possible.
It's pretty amazing what you can get in terms of power density these days.
https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Power-Amplifier-IRS2092S-Chan...
Wow that’s like such an obvious thing that makes so much sense. I have no doubt something like “Hands on, Hands on, Hands on” will start chirping in near future
I know. I've known about this technique since the 80s, and yet still we get those stupid beeps coming out of the speaker.
> But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.
I'd like to know more about this, actually.
A .wma music file is just an array of values ranging from -x to +x. Above a certain threshold, replace it with 1. Below, replace it with 0.
Now feed the 1s (+5V) and 0s (0V) into the speaker at the same rate as the sampling in the .wma file.
Since the speaker cone has inertia, the result will be an approximation of the original waveform, rather than a square wave.
Sigma-Delta Modulation
English is the universal aviation language.
In other contexts there is no such language, and I can see how the politics of which and how many languages we should include in our car messages may well result in a "let's just use beeps" decision.
They have to supply written documentation in an appropriate language too, I don’t think it would be that difficult for it to have a voice language pack to match.
You're talking about an industry that gives you a generic "check engine" light and allows dealerships to charge you $100 just to read you the error message.
I don't have any faith that they have the wherewithal to make any common sense design choices about error states.
You cannot look up "beep" in the manual when you have 40 beeps.
You are not objectively worse off with a word than a beep, even if you do not understand the word.
Driving a car with beeps and chimes and dings means they all mush together and get ignored.
Feels like it'd be easier to differentiate jingles compared to different words of a language you don't know. You can vary intonations etc, but by that point you're back to jingles.
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Japanese appliances play unique tunes in order to avoid beep confusion and reduce user annoyance. A tune is also more easily distinguished from voice if you don't speak the language. Western appliances have slowly started doing the same. (https://www.gearpatrol.com/home/a45038903/singing-appliances...)
I don't want tunes. I want a voice. It is not any harder to learn 3 Japanese words than 3 random tunes. You don't have to learn Japanese. It's 3 words.
It's the same thing as those stupid icons on buttons. The rationale is that some pre-contact tribesman will have a car and not know English. Well, he isn't going to know what the ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp icon is, either. And learning 3 English words is not a tragedy. At least the words can be looked up. The icons (and beeps) cannot.
Many Japanese appliances actually do speak, but you'd probably have a hard time troubleshooting them.
One day the normal sounds you're used to don't happen, and instead you hear "Kyūshi torei de kami ga tsumatte imasu." So you try to find a manual to understand what it means, and the manual has a Japanese section ("給紙トレイで紙が詰まっています。") and an English section ("The paper loader is jammed."). How do you know that the sound you heard ("Kyūshi torei de kami ga tsumatte imasu") means "The paper loader is jammed" unless you already read and speak Japanese? One way to figure it out would be... icons.
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