A narrow depression, opening, hole, slit, or aperture, especially one for receiving a piece that fits or slides in it. The word is also used as a metaphor for a position in a sequence or schedule: I was slotted into the interview at 9 am.
The slots in casino machines into which coins or paper tickets with barcodes are inserted to activate the reels and allow players to win money or prizes. The word has come to be associated with gambling, but it can be applied to other games of chance as well, such as chess.
In computer science, a slot (also called an allotment or allotment) is a reserved area of memory in a machine that can be accessed by programs. In contrast to a general-purpose variable-length array, which is memory that can be accessed by any program at any time, a slot is allocated to a single program only. In this way, a program can avoid accessing general-purpose memory and protect itself from potential corruption by malicious code.
In a chatbot, the term slot refers to specific elements in an utterance that the bot can use as slots for interpreting user input. For example, if an utterance says, “I’d like to book two executive rooms for three nights starting tomorrow,” the bot identifies the slots in the utterance—rooms required, number of nights, and date—and maps them to built-in slot types, such as Rooms, Date, and Executive. If a slot type isn’t already available, the bot can create a new custom slot by clicking Add Slot Type and entering a regular expression that matches values to be mapped.