I have an Alexa skill that at one point asks for names, and at another point asks for numbers. The names are being mapped to a slot of type AMAZON.FirstName and the numbers to a slot of type AMAZON.NUMBER. The problem is that Alexa is aggressively interpreting even number values as names. (e.g. Saying "eight" is likely to be cast as the name "Tate.")
From what I can tell, Dialog Delegation is useful only if you know exactly how many of each type you need to capture. But in my case there are a variable number of times I will need to capture a name, so I can't just fill that slot once and be done with it.
Ideally I would like a way to programmatically turn the slots on and off. So when I prompt the user for a name, any utterance CAN ONLY BE MAPPED TO A NAME or else rejected (obviously HELP and EXIT, etc would still work). And then when I ask for a number, any utterance WILL ONLY BE MAPPED TO A NUMBER, it won't even try to cast it into the type AMAZON.FirstName.
Is there any way to achieve that? Or are there any other workarounds for scenarios like this?
I'd change the approach you're taking. You have a great tool for validation before even getting to code itself. Click the slot you're trying to validate, then click on the "validations" tab.
Right there, you can add either one or two rules. If you do one, you can add the "not within a set of values" and you can type "one", "two", etc. in order to avoid getting those numeric values inside your name slot.
If you take the two rule validation, you will need to add a "Value within slot types' slot values". That way, you will only accept values inside the AMAZON.FirstName slot type.
You don't really need to enable/disable a slot, you can simply take both in the same utterance. Just make sure you're validating your slots properly and that way you'll avoid unvalid data from getting into your skill :)
Read more: https://developer.amazon.com/es-mx/docs/custom-skills/validate-slot-values.html