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?

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.

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

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.

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.