Use the Nato Alphabet

[Cedar]

I plan to extend this into a longer post, but for now I want to tell a story.

I have a name that is pretty difficult for English speakers to just “know” the spelling of from the pronounciation.

Recently I started using the Nato alphabet. It really greatly reduces the friction of e.g. communicating to a telecom provider over the phone.

If you, like me, struggle to find words for spelling words, try:

http://​​natoalpha.bet/​​

Disclaimer: I made it after struggling way too much with remembering /​ coming up with the words.

[Thomas Kwa]

The site is missing Z.

[jmh]

That would be Zebra for those interested.

[gbear605]

Interestingly, it apparently used to be Zebra, but is now Zulu. I’m not sure why they switched over, but it seems to be the predominant choice since the early 1950s.

[Cedar]

somewhat far-fetched guess:

internet → everybody does astrology now → zebra gets confused with Libra → replacement with Zulu

[9eB1]

According to Wikipedia, the rough timeline is that there were several standards in use by military and civil aviation in the 1940s and earlier, including separate standards for Latin America and elsewhere, and these used Zebra in the US and UK. The International Air Transport Association presented a draft in1947 to the standards body International Civil Aviation Organization that was meant to rectify this, but it still contained Zebra. Apparently this alphabet wasn’t good enough, because the ICAO hired a linguistics professor to create a revised alphabet, and it’s this one that first contained Zulu, published in 1951.

There were several subsequent revisions following this, where the words were tested in university laboratories in the US and UK, before the final list was broadly adopted in 1956. Interestingly, according to this document written in 1959, the team that was revising the 1951 list attempted to replace Zulu with Zebra, but found that it didn’t help the intelligibility of the alphabet, so Zulu was kept in the final standard.

As the next step in the modification, three more words were changed, FOOTBALL, UNIFORM, and ZEBRA were selected for insertion in the alphabet and a new series of tapes, training, and test sessions were instituted. As previously mentioned, the intelligibility of a word is seriously affected by the company it keeps, and it is therefore necessary to test a substitution in the context of the entire alphabet. Articulation scores for individual words should be used only as indicators of the word’s performance in a given context.

A study of the comparative scores on the two modifications and the original ICAO alphabet showed that although the six-word modification [including three words + FOOTBALL, UNIFORM and ZEBRA] is superior to the original alphabet, it falls short in performance when compared with the first three-word modification [excluding FOOTBALL, UNIFORM, ZEBRA] -- more confusions were introduced than were removed by the second three-word modification, although these confusions cropped out in unexpected parts of the matrix. The problem is not unlike that of pushing a dent out of a child’s celluloid ball—even a successful push leaves a small dent in another place.

[Jayson_Virissimo]

When I worked for a police department a decade ago, we used Zebra, not Zulu, for Z, but our phonetic alphabet started with Adam, Baker, Charles, etc...

[Cedar]

Ty 4 the catch. Used chatgpt to generate the html and i think when i asked it to add the CSS, it didn’t have enough characters to give me everything.

[the gears to ascension]

the alphabet i use for talon voice rec (words I have enabled in the recognizer but don’t often say in parens—I’m consider changing U, hence lots of options):

arch, brov (bravo), char, delta (david, dunk), echo (each), foxy (fox, fun, flow), goof (gust), hotel (harp), india (ivy), julia (jury, jug), kilo (kale), lima (look), mike, nap (novakeen, nancy), oscar (odd), prime, quench (quebec), romeo, side (sierra), tango (trip), uniform (umpire, use, unit, unite, user, unreal), victor (vest, vine), whiskey (whale), xenon (xray), yankee, zinc (I do not have “zulu” enabled at all because of how often it’s confused for “zero” with this config)

[Cedar]

checked out talon. looks amazing for people with disabilities.

now as a person with no obvious disabilities i wonder if it’s still worth it to learn it for:

1. just incase

2. maybe eyetracking etc would make it easier to do things on my computer vs mouse & kbd.

any opinions?

[the gears to ascension]

eyetracking requires dedicated hardware I don’t have. the disability level it takes before talon is a great augmentation is very slight—in general, speaking sloppily because this isn’t the best way to express the social model of disability, but it’s a solid one—disability is when you need transhumanism to be considered “normal” by society. (a society without the concept of disability would be one where transhumanism was so completely pervasive that no relative difference was perceptible no matter how internally weak the person’s original body.)

Talon is great for impromptu dictation. it’s not as good as whisper at dictation but it is dang close, and it’s much faster. I’m hopeful it’ll get whisper integration for dictation at some point. but in the meantime, it’s great to have it when my fingers are too cold to type. I’d def suggest trying it out just in case, and if you like it, keep using it. it’s distinctly better than dragon and patreon-supported, and I can in fact get stuff done coding with it. (though usually I use it for web browsing. eg I typed this comment but can still go, computer wake, press escape, hints on, click arch prime, tab close,)