Our skill uses SearchQuery in order to accept a "free-form" and unstructured response from the user. However, the SearchQuery intent is still restricted to the 8 second response limit. This can be confusing for users, as the user has no way of knowing that the 8 second limit exists or how long they have been talking for. To make things worse, Alexa will actually let you talk for longer than 8 seconds but will reject the response if it was longer than the limit. If no reprompt is set, the skill is terminated and the user is left with no feedback as to why their response didn't work and why the skill ended.

I understand the need for a time limit, however 8 seconds is too short of a response time for many of the use cases that SearchQuery can allow. As a work around, we are letting the user state their response over several SearchQuery invocations. This is very clunky and hard to use.