A slot is a narrow opening in a machine or container, for example, a hole that you insert coins into to make it work. It can also refer to a position in a schedule or program: She’s booked for the eight o’clock slot on Thursdays.

The number of symbols on a slot machine’s reels determines how many combinations are possible, and the jackpot size. Some slot games have a fixed payout amount, while others have a progressive jackpot that increases with each spin.

Traditionally, slots have only had one symbol per reel, but manufacturers have experimented with adding more to increase the number of winning combinations. For example, the newer video slots can have up to 22 symbols, or “stops,” and some have different types of symbols that appear only on certain reels.

In programming, a slot is a dynamic placeholder that either waits for content (a passive slot) or calls out for it (an active slot). Slots work with scenarios and renderers to deliver content to the page. You can define your own slot types using regular expressions (regex) patterns. For example, if you want your bot to be able to match flight codes in a given utterance, you can create a slot type by using the regex pattern, [A-Z]d2r34$, in the Slot Types page. Once you’ve created a slot type, you can assign it to a specific slot in the Slots page. Then when the bot encounters that slot in an utterance, it will process the information according to the specified rule.