
The 'meteoric rise' of lifts: will a new breed of elevator transform our cities? - kawera
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/dec/23/meteoric-rise-lifts-magnetic-smart-elevators-transform-cities
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WalterBright
Why don't elevators announce the floor they arrive at? Wouldn't that work much
better for blind people?

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wallacoloo
At the very least, most elevators emit a beep when they pass each floor. This
might not be true of faster moving elevators - I don't know.

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WalterBright
You can get surprisingly decent speech output from a computer with nothing
more than connecting a speaker to an I/O pin. So there's no more cost to that
than a beeper. This is what is frustrating about the beepers!

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wallacoloo
Buildings have a host of different floor arrangements. In elevators, you'll
see P1, P2 (parking), L (lobby), B (basement), LB (lower basement), UB (upper
basement), M ("middle" floors, for buildings that have staggered floors),
etc...

Most elevators must know the name of the floor they're passing by (since they
display it). But if you ship a speech system that just pronounces each symbol
(e.g. "Floor pee one" or "Floor ell"), it may initially be confusing for most
passengers ("What is 'floor ell'?"). A well-polished solution is going to take
more effort by both the vendor and the client (and if it's not well-polished,
the feature's likely to be considered a wart by those who don't actually need
it).

Plus, a beeper just needs to be audible - distortion is totally acceptable. A
speech system will need a higher-spec'd amplifier and speakers (so that both
components behave linearly over the full signal range) for the speech to be
comprehensible.

Far from insurmountable, but I think it'd be an error to say that there isn't
more cost in announcing floor names than just beeping as you pass a floor.
It's almost definitely marginal in the scheme of building costs, but it's
there.

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WalterBright
> A speech system will need a higher-spec'd amplifier and speakers (so that
> both components behave linearly over the full signal range) for the speech
> to be comprehensible.

No, it does not. I was surprised to find out that it was not necessary back in
the PC era, where the speaker was simply connected to an I/O pin. It was meant
to just produce buzzing noises. But programmers found out that it could
produce surprisingly intelligible speech, at a modest but quite usable volume.

How it's done is sampling a waveform of recorded speech at on/off levels at a
rate at which data could be written to the I/O pin. The distortion inherent in
driving a speaker on/off ironically smoothed it out into a decent
approximation of the original waveform.

Peoples' ears are extremely good at picking out speech from distortion, noise,
etc.

> it may initially be confusing for most passengers ("What is 'floor ell'?")

No more confusing than a lighted "L" which I suggest remain. The audio is not
a replacement for the lights, just a supplement. Though of course the audio
could just as trivially say "Lobby" or "Parking Level 2" as "L" or "P2".

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WalterBright
If I was an elevator designer, they'd accelerate upwards at about .3g and
downwards at about .9g (leaving just enough gravity to keep you on the floor).

Acceleration would be continuous.

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danieltillett
I am not sure I would want to get in your lift after a meal or with anyone who
had eaten recently.

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WalterBright
I'd dub it the E-Ticket Elevator!

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danieltillett
I think 'Vomit Comet’ might be more accurate :)

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WalterBright
I'm not hiring you for my marketing department!

