I spend a lot of time on the phone with tech support personnel that don't understand ticket numbers and product codes I'm reading, so I find myself using the good old NATO phonetic alphabet fairly often.

Sometimes, though, I have a hard time remembering some of the letters. P, for example, is not Peter, it's Papa.

Thankfully, developer Nicholas Wagner has two handy utilities to help. Phonetic is offered as both a desktop application for Windows and Linux and a web-based utility. The RealBasic source code is also available for download.

The web version displays translation on the fly directly the text field. It's a tool well worth bookmarking for anyone that needs to spell things out to, say, computer software or hardware support workers.