A narrow depression, notch, or slit, especially one for receiving something, such as a coin or a letter. Also, a position in a sequence or series: Her TV show is scheduled to air in the eight o’clock slot on Thursdays. To place or fit into a slot: He was able to squeeze in at the last minute.
In the 19th century, Sittman and Pitt created what is believed to be the first slot machine, a contraption that spun five drums lined with poker symbols. Winning was achieved by lining up poker hands. Charles Fey improved upon the machine, replacing the poker symbols with diamonds, spades, horseshoes, hearts, and liberty bells—three aligned liberty bells being the highest win—creating what became known as the “Liberty Bell” slot.
Modern slot machines are programmed with microprocessors that assign different probabilities to each symbol on a reel. This gives the illusion that a particular symbol is close to appearing, whereas it actually has a low probability of showing up.
When you’re creating a bot for an industry or organization, it is important to choose the right slot types to map values to. For example, you can use regular expressions (regex) to create a custom slot type that recognizes the phrase “flight number”. This allows your bot to handle flight cancellations and delays, rather than waiting on the ground or in the air, burning unnecessary fuel. You can also add synonyms to a slot type, so that the bot recognizes multiple words and phrases that match a specific entity value.