A narrow depression, groove, notch, or slit, especially one for receiving something, such as a coin or letter. A position or time in a schedule or sequence: Her TV show is in the eight-o’clock slot on Thursdays.
The term can also refer to a position in a football game or other sport, such as the area of the field between the face-off circles on an ice hockey rink. A defensive back in football is tasked with covering the slot receiver, who catches passes all over the field and is difficult to cover due to their speed and athletic ability.
A slot is a device on a reel of a slot machine that stops at a specific place, displaying a symbol or symbols. The first slot machines were invented in the 19th century by Sittman and Pitt, who used five reels and a fixed number of poker symbols (clubs, hearts, diamonds, horseshoes, and Liberty Bells). Winning was achieved by lining up matching symbols on a payline.
In Dialog Engine, slots are mapped to values in utterances by using regular expressions (regex). For example, if you want your bot to match flight codes, create a regex pattern like