title: Can Google Home wait indefinitely for a response?
body: <p>I'm pretty sure the answer to this is "no" but I figured I'd share the question anyway in case others have a clever workaround :)</p>
  
  <p>I'm building a recipe action so the user could say "Let's make tortilla soup" and then say "next step" to move on to the next part of the recipe. Between each step there might be a long pause as the user is cutting vegetables, etc. Is it possible to have Home either indefinitely wait for a user response or wait for several minutes? Currently it'll wait a few seconds and say something like "Sorry I didn't understand that response" and eventually quit the action.</p>
  
  <p>Forcing the user to go through the "OK, Google, let me talk to the Chef" action over and over is pretty annoying and, I assume, would require immediately ending the conversation after every step, otherwise the device will hang and say "Sorry I didn't understand".</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Update</strong></p>
  
  <p>I've found a pretty hacky way of doing this by abusing SSML. There are two options, you can stack up <code>&lt;break/&gt;</code>s</p>
  
  <pre><code>assistant.ask(`&lt;speak&gt;&lt;break time="120s"/&gt;&lt;break time="120s"/&gt;&lt;/speak&gt;`);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This actually causes the Home to play a really weird droning noise. Something the devs might wanna look at :D</p>
  
  <p>Another option (which avoids the drone) is to play a 2 minute silent audio clip. According to the docs, 2 minutes is the limit for <code>&lt;audio&gt;</code> but you can stack them up. I just verified that you can make it sit there for at least ten minutes.</p>
  
  <pre><code>assistant.ask(`&lt;speak&gt;&lt;audio src="https://.../pause.mp3"&gt;hello&lt;/audio&gt;&lt;audio src="https://.../pause.mp3"&gt;&lt;/audio&gt;&lt;/speak&gt;`)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>You cannot speak directly to the agent while its paused like this but you <em>can</em> say "OK Google, [whatever command]" and that command will actually get passed to the agent.</p>