a narrow depression, groove, notch, or slit, especially one for receiving something, as a coin or a letter. a position or place in a series or sequence: She was scheduled to appear on the show at the eight o’clock slot.

A small opening in a piece of machinery, furniture, or other object, into which something may be fitted or slide, such as a keyway in a lock or a slit for a coin on a vending machine.

In the context of air traffic management, a time period in which a flight may take off or land at an airport. Slots are used to prevent overcrowding of busy airports and reduce or eliminate the frequent delays caused by too many planes trying to operate at the same time.

To play a slot machine, you insert cash or, in ticket-in, ticket-out machines, a paper ticket with a barcode into the designated slots on the machine’s chassis and activate it by pushing a button or pulling a handle. The machine then spins the reels and pays out credits based on the symbols lined up on the paytable.

In Dialog Engine, you can map slot information in an utterance to custom slot types. For example, you can map the value rooms required to a built-in slot type and use a regular expression (regex) to define what the bot will look for when searching for the corresponding slot in an utterance, such as, “I need two executive rooms for three nights starting tomorrow.” You can add synonyms for a slot to make it easier for Dialog Engine to recognize different words and phrases that correspond to the same slot information.