Let alone the parsimony that led the original 737 design (and so too its grandfathered descendants) to recycle the same horn sound for two different situations: incorrect takeoff configuration and cabin altitude. Boeing's reasoning was simple: one of them only gets heard on the ground, the other only at high altitude, so it won't be ambiguous. Except that many pilots will be familiar with the first case (e.g. skipped a checklist item before starting takeoff roll) and relatively few with the second case (pressurization failure). So on Helios 522 the increasingly incapacitated flight crew spent their final conscious minutes trying to debug the wrong scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

People get angry at the self-checkout for telling them to please be sure to take all of their bagged items - personally, I'd crack the dash open and rip out the voicebox if my car spoke to me. I would, however, prefer voice for serious hazards, or for some hands free operations, like device pairing. "Leaking oil/belt broken/wheel flat - pull over now" would probably save a lot of people a lot of money.

I suppose my point is the idea of "this plane is going to crash" demands a bit more clarity for users than "you left your lights on," which probably contributes to why tones are more common in the car.

A similar confusion may be audible in any McDonalds. Their kitchens have many alerts and alarms, and many of them use the same tone. Get a beverage, stand with a view behind the counter toward the kitchen, wait, and listen.

Back in the 80's people would make intelligible speech simply by connecting a speaker to a 5V 1-bit I/O port. So there's no excuse from a cost standpoint.

People seem to be afraid of treating their people like idiots; when it comes to airplanes, you cannot be ambiguous when it comes to emergency / unexpected situations.

With cars, I've had the privilege of driving cars with automatic lights for a while now, I don't have to think about it anymore. On older cars, my dad used to fiddle with the wiring a bit and install an alarm if he turned the engine off or opened the door with the lights still on. That was just the one alarm though.

I imagine that originally the tone-based warnings and alerts were easier to implement. As for the situation regarding cars, it’s probably due to the fact that these beepers etc are already approved, and verbal messages would require an audio system that is cued to whatever display language is chosen.

And you’d need to ensure it‘a compatible with the letter of every law and regulation whether you are marketing your vehicle.

> that is cued to whatever display language is chosen.

I don't see any way a tone is better than a voice yelling at me in a language I don't understand.

Many oil refineries, chemical plants and the likes today use tone based sirens to warn of accidents and evacuations. Even as a visitor you are expected to carefully read the leaflet and be able to recognize the difference between tones that tell you whether you are in immediate danger and what you need to do next.

Perhaps the brain has an easier time distinguishing between a reasonable number of distinct simple tones rather than between complex words you do not understand and can more easily be confused. If you have to deal with 2-3 alarms then tones are pretty intuitive, reliable, and very simple to implement even with century old tech. If you have 50 critical alarms then you probably want them explicitly informative, words in your own language.

Today the need for complexity and the fact that we have advanced, reliable technology for alerts already made voice warnings standard especially in complex systems operated by well trained individuals (pilots on a plane).

> very simple to implement even with century old tech

A loudspeaker is ancient technology and trivial.

For tones, yes. That's exactly what I meant. But armed just with loudspeaker tech you'd have quite some time trying to develop a reliable system with voice alerts, let alone dozens of them. This became possible in more recent times when playing voice recordings (or synthesize it) for dozens of types of alerts became technologically feasible and reliable enough to use in critical scenarios.

On the other hand, back in the 1980s Lee Iacocca was promoting American Innovation with the Chrysler talking car.

So imagine a 1983 K-car saying "The door is ajar. The door is ajar. The door is ajar. The door is ajar," until you went insane. I think the option only lasted for a year or two and then was buried very deeply.

The urgency of the message is lost.

The most chilling/disturbing thing you read in the transcripts of plane crashes is some statement or similar that "the crew had never previously heard this audible warning".