Extracting the first letter of a string
The only thing I can see is that you don't need to have the return on a separate line.  return next((c for c in text if c.isalpha()), "") works fine.  It works on both python 2 and python 3 from what I can see.

Also, you could use filter in this situation: return next(iter(filter(unicode.isalpha, text)), ""), although I am not sure that is any real improvement.  On python 3 this approach is a bit simpler: return next(filter(str.isalpha, text), "")