Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsmalch | Hacker News Reader

Now to commit the whole NATO Phonetic Alphabet to memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

You really only need to memorize it if you're going to speak it. If you're only listening, then you merely have to know that each word represents the first letter used to spell that word.

It depends on what you're listening to. If there's enough noise, it is helpful to know that "ahkschah" was probably transmitted as "foxtrot."

Doesn't take long at all and has been pretty handy to me when giving account numbers, tracking numbers, whatever to people over the phone.

They do sometimes seem surprised that you are using the "offical" words so I gather knowing this is pretty uncommon.

<nostalgia time>I learned it from The Pocket Ref book as a kid</nostalgia time>

Growing up in the outdoors and sailing, I learned to use this as second nature when relaying information - it's crazy that when you start doing this on the phone how few people understand it and you have to resort to A like Apple, F like Frank... it feels so childish after the clarity and precision of the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Interesting, I've never had people on the phone not understand it. If anything I sometimes get the opposite, they start talking faster and treating me with less of the "yet another moron on the phone" attitude that I'm sure you can't help developing working a call centre.

I always thought it was a shibboleth, like the tech support reaction I'm sure people here get occasionally where you can hear them realize they aren't going to have to explain how to click on a menu entry to you and switch scripts after you correctly use a technical phrase. Come to think of it, maybe they assume I was/am in the military. That never occurred to me before.

I work on software that is used by, among others, the vehicle repair trade in the UK. The phonetic alphabet is commonly used by them to relay vehicle registration numbers over the phone. I've noticed that they rarely use it with customers though.

It's easy. I learned it three decades ago by this innovative method. Sing the phonetics to the rhythm of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy".

I want to continuously monitor for 10-codes and record incidents in a DB. Any ideas for the speech recognition portion? I figure it should be easier than full blown text-to-speech because I'm just looking for a small set of 10-codes: 10-4, 10-55, etc.

Google's WebSpeech API looks pretty good: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html

CMU Sphinx and Julius both also have options for continuous speech recognition, but it's quite a feat to train your own [good] language model.

Do things that don't scale: pay your kid to do it.

That would be awesome. Exactly what I wanted to do but no idea how to accomplish it.

In my area, the two city PDs and FDs, the sheriff's office, and the rural fire districts all use LAPD[1], not NATO. I gather LAPD is most common throughout the US.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPD_phonetic_alphabet

I've never even heard anybody use this for anything. Huh.

For flying, and for ham radio, we use NATO.

I noticed cop shows/movies used it, but I figured Hollywood just made up their own version for whatever reason.

Why bother? It's intuitive enough: "Alpha" => 'A', "Bravo" => 'B', and so on...

English > NATO may not be easy without memorization, but there's no need to memorize anything if you want NATO > English.

"M as in marshmallow"

I thought it was m as in mancy =)

M as in mnemonic.

N as in mnemonic

P as in Pterodactyl

Or Psmith.

L for Leather is my favourite

Practice the phonetic alphabet when you're on a long boring drive by spelling out the words on signs. Extra points if you spell the whole word before you pass the sign.

Extra fun tip: replace "uniform" with "unicorn".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com