A narrow notch, groove, or opening, such as a keyway in machinery or a slit for coins in a vending machine. Also called slit, hole, vent, opening, window, and niche.

Linguisticsa position within a construction into which any one of a set of morphemes or morpheme sequences can be fit; a functionary position: He slotted the new filter into place.

Aeronauticsan allocated, scheduled time and place for an aircraft to take off or land, as authorized by an airport or air-traffic control authority:

Slot Machine

A casino machine that pays out credits based on a paytable after a player inserts cash or, in “ticket-in, ticket-out” machines, a paper ticket with a barcode. The machine then activates reels that spin and stop to rearrange symbols. Depending on the machine, symbols may include classic items such as fruits, bells, or stylized lucky sevens. Most slots have a theme and bonus features that align with the theme.

In NLU, a slot is a placeholder for data that you add to your NLU model in order to perform an action or trigger a response. You can use slots to perform customer identification and verification, or as triggers for actions such as escalation or routing. Slots are not bound to specific intents, so they can be accessed from multiple intents in your bot flow. This improves efficiency and reduces the effort required to build your bots. The NLU configuration you select when creating a slot determines the type of information that can be inserted into it.