The term “slot” is an allusion to the space in a rink between the faceoff circles, which is the zone where the puck is most likely to score without deflection. Despite its name, this area is not as narrow as it may seem. In field and ice hockey, the slot is the fourth position on the ice. The word “slot” comes from the Latin verb sleutanus, which means “to cut a slot.” It also comes from the German Schloss.
A regular expression is a pattern that maps values to a specific type of slot, such as an entity value. For example, the entity value “New York” may be mapped to the slots NYC and Big Apple. A user can add more than one synonym by clicking the field and pressing Enter. To remove a synonym, hover over it and click the X. A regular expression works very well for mapping text to slot types. The dialog engine also understands multiple words or phrases in an utterance.
A slot is a discrete piece of information that a bot can use to fulfill a user’s intent. Each slot has a corresponding Slot Type, which describes the type of information the bot is supposed to look for. In other words, a slot can be empty, or it can contain multiple slots. In any event, a slot is defined by an entity. Similarly, the slots are mapped to the entities they represent. The built-in slots map to entities such as number of rooms requested, date, and room type. A slot can be created by entering the name of the entity in the Utterance tab, or by using the user’s input field.