question

It seems that lately Echo has become less adept at handling dates. I've noticed a lot of problems -- sometimes a request with a date will be interpreted correctly and other times the same exact request said exactly the same way will cause Echo to end the session, stall and finally say "the requested application too too long to respond". Some times when I say, for example, "Thursday" echo will respond with a date for a Sunday. Occasionally Echo will close the session when an utterance contains a date. I'll go in and add a new date format (for example {monday|Date}) and sometimes that will fix the problem for a while until it get's confused with a different date format. Why is it necessary to provide examples for dates anyway? If you create a date slot I would think that would be enough for Echo to attempt to interpret any spoken text in that position as a date no matter if it's "monday", "tomorrow", "June 5th", "last wednesday", etc. Why put the burden of anticipating every date format and providing examples on the developer? For one intent I now have over 500 sample utterances when there should probably be 1/10th of that number. Anyway, I'd appreciate any insights as to how to specify a date slot so that it is reliably interpreted regardless of the format used for the date. Also , is there any way to prevent Echo from closing the session when it cannot map what is spoken by the user to an intent? It would be nice to give the app a chance to respond with something like "sorry, I didn't understand that -- would you please try again?" rather than Echo unilaterally closing the session and saying "the requested application too too long to respond" (which makes no sense). Thanks.