I am not seeing anything in the docs (Alexa Skills Kit or Alexa Voice Service) about adjusting the time that the device waits for a command after the "wake word" (default: "Alexa") has been uttered. I was wondering if I could adjust it and how to do so, preferably programmatically.
Is it possible? How so?
This is part of the hardware device behavior. So it cannot be done via the SDKs.
The underlying service, Alexa, doesn't support the concept of a wake word. In fact, it is against the terms and conditions of people using AVS to enable hardware devices to use a wake word without explicit permission from Amazon. So it isn't the sort of thing you would expect to see available programmatically.
The same goes for the other constants that govern how the hardware reacts such as the timeout in waiting for the service to respond, how long it waits for the user to say something before a reprompt, or how long it waits after the reprompt before hanging up.