Frank Oglesby

See also: As the MBTA shifts to text-to-speech announcements, it’s the end of an era for Frank Oglesby’s voice

Frank will always be “the” voice for me. The new text-to-speech should’ve been based on his voice, you can’t tell me otherwise.

The Green Line voice that says "Medford slash Tufts" is computer generated.

Frank did not quit to be a voice over artist. After a long and successful career at the T he retired. They have brought him back a few times to make updates and add some new material. However, Frank will not be around forever, hence the switch to digital speech recognition.

It has some bugs. That is because the people entering the text don't understand how speech recognition from printed text works. Some words have to be written as they sound... not spelled. You do this phonetically. This is especially true with some spellings.

Gloucester would speak "glaw-ces-ter." You need to write it out "gloss-ter" to allow the pattern recognition engine do it right. With some luck you can sometimes add pauses and some local inflections but not always.

I worked for a company in the Boston area that pioneered test-to-speech pattern recognition.

i remember a driver who made funny announcements. is he still around?