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")

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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