Are any of you using alternative spelling alphabets to the Nato phonetic alphabet? I'd love to hear recommendations for ones with words that are ergonomic and short, but still distinct. Have you made a custom one or is there a "Dvorak" of of spelling alphabets that is better, but not widely used?

We suspect your request is not available because the world is accustomed to the NATO phonetic alphabet which was created to prevent recognition mistakes in the single syllable alphabet, which is used by the world's English emergency services. a b c is clearly significantly faster but also problematic. We took the time of memorizing the phonetic alphabet so that we can rapidfire letters back to our customers when they make the mistake of spelling their name or address with letters like b c d e g. If our customer isn't quite able to comprehend us rapidfire spelling via the phonetic alphabet, we resort to saying b as in Bravo and g as in golf. Single syllable words are also a problem with Dragon like an vs and. We believe your only option will be to create your own single syllable alphabet and turn it into a Dragon or KnowBrainer Advanced-Scripting listing command. Note that if you use this approach, you will probably have to add some of your uniquely spelled words to your vocabulary. The advantage of turning this into a command is that Dragon would be locked into your command rather than examining your entire vocabulary. This is why Nuance created Spell <dictation> mode but the a b c alphabet is still not ideal. Fortunately Nuance also added the phonetic alphabet to Spell <dictation> mode, which defaults to a lowercase alphabet. We do the same thing in the KnowBrainer Code <alphabet/numbers> command but default to capital letters which are better suited to codes, part numbers etc. 

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Thanks for the response, Lunis. I did start tweaking the Nato alphabet and think about alternative words, but I suspect that I have to iterate on it a bit to find out what works. I am prepared to write a custom script, but I'm not sure that it's worth the effort making up the list if I can't find an existing one. We will see.

Apparently Caster uses a slightly tweaked version of the Nato alphabet. I tried installing Dragonfly/Natlink a few months ago, but gave up. Made another attempt today using Caster and it actually works. Now I'm really excited to play with it, but that's beside the point. Came across their "arch, brov, char" and thought I'd share. I have no idea what their reasoning is and whether it's any faster, but here's their reference sheet if anyone is curious. It's the kind of stuff I hoped to find when I posted this thread.