NATO Alphabet

Spells a word using the NATO/ICAO phonetic alphabet - "spell Andreas" -> "Alfa, November, Delta, Romeo, Echo, Alfa, Sierra". Genuinely practical for dictating serial numbers, emails, or names over the phone. Pure text-to-table lookup, zero ambiguity, no external dependencies at all.

Usage

"spell Andreas"
"how do you spell hello"
"stav Andreas"          (Danish)

Not translated: the alphabet itself

The NATO/ICAO phonetic alphabet is a single international standard - "Alfa, Bravo, Charlie..." regardless of what language you're speaking to the skill in. Only the intent phrasing ("spell X" vs "stav X") is localized; the alphabet words themselves are not, and shouldn't be - that would defeat the entire point of a standard meant to be understood identically by every listener.

Uses the official ICAO spellings specifically - "Alfa" and "Juliett", not "Alpha"/"Juliet" - a deliberate international standard, not a typo. See test_spell_uses_official_icao_spellings_not_alpha_or_juliet in the test suite.

Digits

NATO officially only standardizes the 26 letters. Digits are spoken as their plain number word in the device's language (not the separate "aviation numeral" pronunciation some radiotelephony contexts use, like "niner" for 9 - that's a narrower convention this skill doesn't attempt to replicate).

A known limitation: Danish æ/ø/å

The NATO alphabet only covers the 26 ASCII letters - Danish "æ", "ø", and "å" have no NATO equivalent and are silently skipped rather than announced or causing an error. "stav Søren" spells S, R, E, N and skips the ø. Not fixed here - there's no standard answer for how to phonetically spell a letter the standard was never designed to cover.

Install

pip install ovos-skill-nato-alphabet

Development

See DEVELOPMENT.md.

Category

Utility

Tags

#spelling #nato #phonetic-alphabet #utility