I find it annoying that they are not using the standard phoenetic alphabet
> Good question. For efficiency, we try to keep commonly used terms such as letters as short as possible. Note that the words we use for letters all one syllable, whereas the NATO phonetic alphabet are mostly two syllables. The words we use for spelling are also chosen so that they can be chained together easily and quickly, eg “harp each look look odd”. Easy to say quickly without slurring
Air, Jury, and Quench in particular strike me as ambiguous examples NATO would never go for. Krunch is just baffling. Plex breaks the scheme followed by every other (that it's the first letter in the word).
You can remap it to whatever you want, and a few users choose either NATO or a custom alphabet. But most stick with Talon's with minor changes (e.g. they might change a specific word if it's harder to say clearly in their accent, or if their mic or environment makes it more difficult to pick up specific sounds).
You can also use the English alphabet for spelling anywhere you can say a word, e.g. "say hello" and "say H E L L O" both work the same.
This isn't a voice assistant where you belt out a command once in a while then move on with your day, and this isn't a low fidelity radio link. These words may be said tens of thousands of times a day. Using three-syllable NATO words is slow and exhausting. It's common for voice programming systems to define their own alphabet based on a truncated NATO alphabet. I went further because I wanted to be able to use vim and play DCSS at very high speeds with my key commands instead of binding a bunch of app specific custom commands.
[1] https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896
Notice that some users even start using Talon's noise support. I even changed "scroll up" to "suh" because I said it 300 times per day.