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Use built-in slot types in a bot flow

Architect bots support two slot types: built-in slots and custom slots. Built-in slots define how the bot recognizes and handles data in the slot. Built-in slots eliminates the need to create enumeration values for commonly used slot data such as date, time, and duration.

Incorporate built-in slots when you create a slot from the Natural Language Understanding menu. To make it easy to use common slots, you can create a slot with your preferred name and then map it to a slot type from Architect’s built-in library. The slot that you create includes the configuration of the built-in slot type.

Note: You can edit a built-in slot type, but you cannot delete it.

Architect includes the following built-in slot types by default:

NLU slot typeArchitect data typeUser input examplesResolved format examplesNotes
builtin:amountOfMoneyCurrency“$30.23” or “forty dollars”

30.23|USD
40.00|USD

  • Converts words that indicate currency into a numeric amount of money.
builtin:dateDate“June 15” or “next Tuesday”

2021-06-15

  • When passing date values into or out of a bot flow, make sure that you pass the value as a string in extended ISO-8601 format. For example, 2021-02-16.
builtin:numberDecimal“23” or “three point five”

23.0

3.5
  • Converts numeric words ("five") into digits (such as "5").
  • This feature does not currently support ordinal numbers (first, second, etc.).
builtin:timeTime“3 p.m.” or “three-thirty p.m.”

15:00:00.000

15:30:00.000

  • Converts words that indicate time ("four in the morning", "two p m") into a time value ("04:00", "14:00").
builtin:anyString"Stratocaster"

Stratocaster

  • Captures as a slot value any user input that does not match a specific regex pattern.
  • Used only with Ask for Slot actions. Does not fill slots during Ask for Intent actions.
  • Cannot be used to detect intents or utterance mapping. Does not provide a NO_HINT syntax to customer.
  • Ensures that numbers and single letters are accurately identified (the "o" in "Stratocaster" is a letter and not a zero).

Add a built-in slot to your bot flow

To add a built-in slot to your bot flow, follow these steps:

  1. Under Natural Language Understanding, click Slots.
  2. From the Intents page, click the Slots tab.
  3. Click Add Slot.
  4. Provide a meaningful name for the slot.
  5. Under Slot Type, click Existing.
  6. From the list, select an existing slot type.
  7. Click Save.

Modify a slot

To modify slot information, from the Slot menu, select a slot and click Edit .

Delete a slot

To delete a slot, from the Slot menu, select a slot and click Delete .