Pyphonetics is a Python 3 library for phonetic algorithms. Right now, the following algorithms are implemented and supported:

• Soundex
• Metaphone
• Refined Soundex
• Fuzzy Soundex
• Lein
• Matching Rating Approach

In addition, the following distance metrics:

• Hamming
• Levenshtein

More will be added in the future.

The module is available in PyPI, just use pip install pyphonetics.

>>> from pyphonetics import Soundex
>>> soundex = Soundex()
>>> soundex.phonetics('Rupert')
'R163'
>>> soundex.phonetics('Robert')
'R163'
>>> soundex.sounds_like('Robert', 'Rupert')
True

The same API applies to every algorithm, e.g:

>>> from pyphonetics import Metaphone
>>> metaphone = Metaphone()
>>> metaphone.phonetics('discrimination')
'TSKRMNXN'

You can also use the distance(word1, word2, metric='levenshtein') method to find the distance between 2 phonetic representations.

>>> from pyphonetics import RefinedSoundex
>>> rs = RefinedSoundex()
>>> rs.distance('Rupert', 'Robert')
0
>>> rs.distance('assign', 'assist', metric='hamming')
2

The module was largely based on the implementation of phonetic algorithms found in the Talisman.js Node NLP library.