AWS Lex slot type for free form text

Question

I am using AWS Free tier and trying to develop a bot for first time. In one of the scenarios I need to ask the description of the problem as a prompt(where user will enter free form text including alphabets, numbers, space, special characters).

However I am not able to find a slot type which fulfils the criteria. I used all slots like Alphanumeric, Street Name but fails in one use case or other. I am not sure how to write a regex that AWS slots will support for my case.

I read something about "Amazon.Person" however not able to see that option in North Virginia region -

Can anyone help on it?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Lex does not have a built-in slot type for free form text.

It is recommended that you create a custom slot type that will hold part of your user response. Train it with data that is similar to what you expect from the user (I've also sometimes had it work with the built-in AMAZON.AlphaNumeric slot type).

However, Lex tends to leave out words and phrases. To overcome this, you'll need to create a Lambda Function and use it to access the inputTranscript. The inputTranscript is the last text the user typed exactly the way they typed it.

Here is another answer that I think explains things much better than I have :)