14. A vehicle navigation system comprising: a data set containing a plurality of phonetic letter families representing the letters of an alphabet, where each phonetic letter family includes one or more letters which sound similar when spoken; a navigation database of street addresses, street names, city names, and state names, which includes both an actual spelling of each name and a phonetic equivalent spelling of each name, where the phonetic equivalent spelling of each name is spelled using the phonetic letter family for each letter in the name; a speech recognition processor that accept a spoken input from a user, said spoken input comprising a series of letters which spell a name which the user wants to find in the navigation database, and for converting each letter of the spoken input to its phonetic letter family to create a series of input phonetic letters; a controller for storing the series of input phonetic letters, and for comparing the series of input phonetic letters to the phonetic equivalent spelling of all names in the database to create a list of possible matches, and narrowing the list of possible matches as each additional letter is added to the series of input phonetic letters; and a display screen for presenting the list of possible matches to the user for confirmation when the user completes the spoken input, and for graphically presenting navigation data to the user.
14. A vehicle navigation system comprising: a data set containing a plurality of phonetic letter families representing the letters of an alphabet, where each phonetic letter family includes one or more letters which sound similar when spoken; a navigation database of street addresses, street names, city names, and state names, which includes both an actual spelling of each name and a phonetic equivalent spelling of each name, where the phonetic equivalent spelling of each name is spelled using the phonetic letter family for each letter in the name; a speech recognition processor that accept a spoken input from a user, said spoken input comprising a series of letters which spell a name which the user wants to find in the navigation database, and for converting each letter of the spoken input to its phonetic letter family to create a series of input phonetic letters; a controller for storing the series of input phonetic letters, and for comparing the series of input phonetic letters to the phonetic equivalent spelling of all names in the database to create a list of possible matches, and narrowing the list of possible matches as each additional letter is added to the series of input phonetic letters; and a display screen for presenting the list of possible matches to the user for confirmation when the user completes the spoken input, and for graphically presenting navigation data to the user. 15. The vehicle navigation system according to claim 14 wherein the alphabet is the Roman alphabet.