Amazon Lex announces support for multi-valued slots

[Amazon Lex](/lex/) is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, you can quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”), virtual agents, and IVR systems. Today, Amazon Lex introduces multi-valued slots. A slot is used to capture user responses as the bot gathers information to fulfill a user request. In some cases, the information can be a list of multiple values. For example, when conversing with an insurance bot, a customer may request quotes for insurance premiums. When the bot requests them to specify which insurance type, the customer may respond with more than one type and say “I need quotes for home, auto, and boat premiums.” With multi-value slots, Amazon Lex can now capture the customer’s response in a single response with no special coding required. Previously, developers had to define multiple slots to capture a list of values (e.g., “home, auto, and boat”) and then aggregate them into one input. Now, developers can use the multi-valued slot to directly capture a list of values as a single response. No additional processing is required and the bot design is simplified. Multi-valued information capture can be enabled via [Lex V2 Console](https://console.aws.amazon.com/lexv2/home) or SDK for slots that reference custom slot types. This capability is available in US English for all [AWS regions](/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions%5Faz/) where Amazon Lex operates. To learn more, visit the [Amazon Lex documentation page](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lexv2/latest/dg/multi-valued-slots.html).