A narrow depression, notch, slit, or opening, as in a keyway or a slot for a coin in a vending machine. A position in a group, sequence, or schedule. The TV show is in the eight o’clock slot on Thursdays.
The word slot is also used to describe a position on an airplane’s flight schedule or in a traffic pattern at an airport. In the latter sense, slots are used to regulate air traffic at very busy airports. Air traffic controllers use them to prevent a repeated delay caused by too many planes trying to take off or land at the same time.
In a bot, a slot is a place in an utterance where the bot can look for information to match against. A slot can be mapped to a specific slot type that defines how the bot will process the information it finds there. For example, if a bot is looking for flights to match against for a travel booking, it can create a custom slot with a regex pattern that matches flight codes. This is a different type of slot from the ones provided by the Bot Framework. To learn more about creating a custom slot, click here. You can also add multiple custom slots to an utterance by using the + icon next to each one. This will create multiple custom slots for the bot to consider. The more slots the bot has to choose from, the more likely it is to find a match.
