"Entering: South Station. The doors will open on the right."

"Entering: Boylston. No smoking, please."

"Route 1 service to Nubian."

If you've lived in or even visited Boston for any amount of time, you'll be familiar with the soothing baritone voice of the MBTA which announces routes, stops, and connections. Arguably as iconic as Charlie himself, the voice of Frank Oglesby has comforted riders through shutdowns, fires, and service changes, providing a known constant in an ever-changing public agency.

Unfortunately, as announced in a statement to The Huntington News, Oglesby's voice is on the way out. With the opening of the new Medford branch of the Green Line, the MBTA is shifting to full text-to-speech announcements, which you may have heard as the "this is" announcements on some Green Line trains. The official reason given by the MBTA is that the need to provide "real-time information through many more channels," makes recording new audio files with Oglesby difficult. In the coming years, the public can expect Oglesby's voice to be fully replaced by a text-to-speech bot.

This issue may not be as pressing as state-of-good repair, frequency, or extensions to the system. Still, it is a major downgrade in the personality of our wonderfully quirky public transit network, and it does not need to be changed. Using a real voice sends the message that rider experience is important and that riders deserve the basic respect of being spoken to by an actual person. While text-to-speech is understandable for unplanned changes, it should always be a last resort.

Now, as the system continues to expand and new train cars are introduced, returning to Oglesby's truly iconic announcements will become harder and harder. We need to act now and tell the MBTA how important it is that our buses and trains have a real person announcing stops, not a computer.