Based on this blog post, do I understand correctly that the current guidance from Amazon is to use SearchQuery as the best option to capture an unpredictable user utterance so that we can process it in a webhook?
The 'carrier phrase' requirement is a killer though. It is so restrictive and un-natural for conversation. After we answer a user's question, we have Alexa say "What else can I help with?". If the user wants to hear about football games, we would like for them to be able to say "football games" instead of "tell me about football games". Any comments on why it exists or when it might change are very welcome.
Also, any other suggestions on how we can pass the full user utterance back to our webhook are also very appreciated. We can do a great job matching the user's utterance to what we need to deliver back if we can just get the full utterance. If we don't have to use SearchQuery with it's carrier phrase limitation it will make for a much better user experience.