Slots

A slot is a specific piece of information that can be derived from an utterance and mapped to an entity.

What are Slots?

Dialog Engine is designed to parse an utterance provided by the user and identify their intent. Dialog Engine uses a process called slot filling to identify pieces of information and maps them to corresponding entities. Each mapping of an intent to a discrete piece of information is termed a slot. Based on the slots identified and mapped, the bot can continue the conversation with the user.

Suppose the input is: I want to book two rooms. This utterance allows the bot to identify a single entity: number of rooms required. And the bot might respond up with follow-up questions.

Slot filling allows collecting multiple pieces of information about the user's intent. Consider, I want to book two rooms for three nights starting tomorrow. The bot identifies slots mentioned in the conversation: two rooms, three nights, and tomorrow and maps them accordingly to the corresponding entities.

Add a slot

You can add slots to an utterance in two ways: from the Slots tab or from the Utterance tab.

• From the Utterance tab, select and click a word or phrase that will be extracted as a slot value.
• From the dialog, select Add New Slot.
• Enter a name to identify the slot.
• Select an entity for the slot name. You can choose from a pre-defined entity or a custom entity.
• Check Slot Required if you want this slot to be mandatory in the utterance.
• Enter the prompt to be displayed to the user. Add more prompts, if needed.
• Click Save.

You can also create a slot from the Slots tab by clicking the Add New Slot button.

Map a slot

After you define entities, you can map specific words to corresponding entities, and Dialog Engine will pick up those slot values.

• In the Utterances tab, double-click a specific word/phrase in an utterance.
• Choose a slot name from the Select slot menu. The selected word/phrase is now indicated as a slot value by a colored underline for the phrase.
• Click Save to save the changes to your domain.

Edit a slot

You can modify any of the slot information by selecting a slot from the Slots tab and clicking the Edit button.

Delete a slot

You can delete a slot by selecting a slot from the Slots tab and clicking the Delete button.