A narrow depression, groove or opening, as a keyway in a piece of machinery or a slit for a coin in a vending machine. Also: A period of time or position within a schedule or sequence. I booked a haircut for the 2 p.m. slot.

A slot is the term for a specific position in a group, series or sequence: ‘I applied for the slot in management training’; ‘He was in the second-to-last slot in the queue.’

The first electromechanical slot was developed in the sixties by Bally and was called Money Honey. It allowed for a much larger payout than traditional mechanical machines and was popular in casinos. It was followed in the seventies by a much more advanced model that was even more lucrative. This new version was called a video slot and allowed for multiple pay lines. Its popularity grew rapidly as more players discovered the advantages of this new type of machine.

When you talk to your bot, it assigns each word or utterance a particular slot based on the values of its entity types. The slot that a value is assigned to determines how it will be processed by the bot. You can customize the mapping of slots for each entity type by selecting one or more of the slot types from the list in the Dialog Engine configuration screen. You can also add synonyms for a slot so that the bot will recognize alternative words and phrases when a user speaks the name of the slot.

There are several different types of slots in the Dialog Engine: builtin:amountOfMoney : maps any amount value; builtin:duration : maps any duration type; and builtin:number : maps any numeric value. You can also define your own custom slots for each entity type by using the Create New Slot option in the Configuration screen. You can then map these custom slots to the corresponding entity types in your utterances.

In aviation, a slot is an allocated, scheduled time for an aircraft to take off or land at a busy airport. This is an essential tool to manage the high volume of air traffic at these airports and prevent repeated delays caused by too many flights attempting to operate at the same time.

A slot is similar to an air-traffic control clearance, but is more restrictive in terms of permitted flight times. It also does not authorize aircraft to land at any particular airport, but only in a certain range of runways within that airport. For this reason, it is important to understand the limits of a slot and how it is used by the air-traffic controller. The use of slot management has been credited with huge savings in both air-traffic delays and fuel burn. This is especially true in the case of the world’s busiest airports. The most successful airports now implement some form of central flow management, which is based on the use of slots.