Proposal: add "spoken name" to desktop entries

[Chanslor Rosenthal]

I hope I'm on the right list, and not being too forward! I got this address from #freedesktop at Freenode.

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Proposal: add a [Spoken Name] field to .desktop files, for use by "virtual assistants."

I'm writing a crude utility to enable the Mycroft personal assistant to launch desktop applications. The most effective route *by far* has been to parse desktop entries, just like your typical application launcher, and cache the results.

The problem arises when trying to name the program out loud. The "name" field in a desktop entry doesn't necessarily correspond to what a user would call the program when discussing it. Hence, "Mycroft, launch Firefox," doesn't do the trick on stock Debian. You have to do, "Mycroft, launch Firefox ESR." Quantum on stock Ubuntu wants to be called, "Firefox Web Browser," or something like that.

There are all manner of partial solutions to this problem. You could cache aliases, preloading the cache with known applications and their colloquial names, and permitting users to add aliases of their own. You could get fancy with the AI, asking it to do fuzzy matching, or hooking into its own parser.

However, this seems like a feature that everybody's going to have within a few years. Why should programmers or users have to work around the written name of an application? Surely it should be up to developers to inform my "virtual assistant" that the program is properly termed *Telegram* and not *Telegram desktop*.