Seems like a more durable solution would be making an encoding of the alphabet that's easier for machines to read.
MICR E13-B: http://www.micr-fonts.com/MICRfont/micrfont.html
(*British. <grin>)
(Yes the phonetic alphabet is meant for ease of hearing by people, but writing a program to understand 26 distinct sounds can't be nearly as hard as natural language transcription.)