Part 7 · Platform, hosting and artificial intelligence

Gen, the assistant

Chat with the Gen assistant inside Symbifox, from the side panel or the full-width page, and set the frame for what it does.

Symbifox 18.0 (September 2026 catalogue) · Modules: Gen, Gen: Cockpit, LLM Provider, AI Bridge (socket transport) · Revised 2026-09-12

Gen is the Symbifox assistant. You ask it a question in plain language, it searches your records, it answers, and it acts: it opens a task, writes to the file, corrects a record. It serves the whole team, from any screen, through a panel that opens on the right or through a full-width page. The artificial intelligence model is reached from your server, with the organization's key: nothing goes through a third-party service chosen on your behalf.

Overview#

Two places give access to the same assistant. The Gen button of the top bar opens a side panel, which follows the record you are reading. The Gen entry of the main menu opens a full-width page, with all your conversations on the left.

Here is that page on the Boréal demo.

Four notions structure the application.

• Conversation: an ongoing exchange with the assistant. It carries a title, belongs to the person who opened it and keeps its messages.
• Linked record: a conversation opened from the panel remembers the record you were reading. The panel then shows only the exchanges that concern that record; the full-width page shows them all.
• Steering instruction: a short directive the assistant follows in all its answers, or only on one type of record.
• Turn: one question and answer round trip. It is the unit the administration counts, in tokens, in duration and in equivalent cost.

What sets this approach apart: the assistant writes in Symbifox under your identity. A task it opens carries your name in the history, not that of an anonymous robot. It works on your real data, not on a copy exported elsewhere.

Configuration#

Access and permissions#

Chat is open to anyone who has an internal account: no particular group is required, and the Gen entry and the top bar button show for everyone. Each person sees only their own conversations.

The Administration submenu appears only to the people who hold the Settings level of Symbifox administration rights. That is where the screens live that show everyone's conversations and their consumption.

Settings#

The settings are in Settings › General Settings, Gen section. Seven things are set there.

• Gen Assistant turns the assistant on. Cleared, the entry and the button disappear.
• Live streaming writes the answer as it is produced. Turned off, the answer arrives in one block at the end.
• Proactive brief gives a situation update when a record opens: the first time the panel opens on a record with no conversation, the assistant reads the record, its chatter (the message thread at the bottom of a form) and its latest activity, then opens with a status update and suggested next steps, without waiting for a question.
• Model is the artificial intelligence model used.
• Max Turns is the maximum number of steps the assistant can chain for a single message. The higher it is, the more complex requests succeed, and the longer they take.
• API Key (optional) is the organization's application programming interface key. It is your subscription to the model provider, and it belongs to you: exchanges are billed to your account, not to the host's.
• Response Timeout is the delay after which an answer that does not arrive is abandoned.

Base data#

Nothing is required to start. An organization that wants to frame the assistant's tone and habits writes a few steering instructions, described in Write a steering instruction.

Getting started#

This walkthrough asks the assistant a first question about a record of the Boréal demo.

1. Go to Contacts and open the Clinique dentaire Rosemont record.
2. In the top bar, select Gen.
3. Read the status update the assistant writes by itself, and the label that recalls the current record.
4. Enter a question in the box at the bottom, for example “Which invoices of this client are still unpaid?”.
5. Send the question.
6. Watch the answer being written, with the tools used along the way.
7. Close the panel with the Escape key.

The conversation is kept. When you reopen the panel from the same record, you find it again; when you open the full-width page, it is there among all your conversations.

Common tasks#

Ask a question from a record#

The side panel serves to work without leaving the current screen.

1. Open the record you want, in any application.
2. In the top bar, select Gen.
3. Enter your question.
4. Send it.

The answer is written as it is produced, and each tool used shows along the way. The panel closes with the Escape key, with the close button, or by selecting the greyed-out area beside it.

Ask for an action rather than an answer#

The assistant writes in Symbifox: that is what sets it apart from a summary.

1. Open the panel from the record concerned.
2. Phrase the request as an instruction, for example “Open a follow-up task for Monday and assign it to me”.
3. Send it.
4. Read the list of tools used under the answer.
5. Open the record created or changed to check it.

The change carries your name in the record's history. An email, for its part, is prepared as a draft: nothing goes out until you have read it over and sent it.

Rename or archive a conversation#

A readable list of conversations is kept in two actions.

1. Go to Gen.
2. In the list on the left, open the conversation.
3. To rename it, select its title twice, enter the new name, then confirm.
4. To put it away, select the archive icon.

An archived conversation leaves the list without disappearing: an administrator finds it again in All Sessions with the archive filter.

Post a conversation to a task#

When an exchange has produced a decision, it belongs in the file rather than in a private thread.

1. Open the conversation in the full-width page.
2. Select the share to a task.
3. Search for the task by its name.
4. Choose it and confirm.

The conversation is posted as an internal note in the task's chatter. It stays readable there by the project team, even if the conversation is archived afterwards.

Write a steering instruction#

A steering instruction is a house rule the assistant follows without anyone having to repeat it.

1. Go to Gen › Steering Instructions.
2. Select New.
3. Enter a short Title, which serves only to find the instruction again.
4. In Instruction, write the directive the way you would say it to a colleague.
5. Choose the Scope: Every conversation or One record type.
6. Leave the Owner empty so that the instruction holds for everyone, or name a person so that it holds only for them.
7. Save.

The instruction applies from the next conversation on. Keep one idea per instruction: two rules in the same text soon contradict each other.

Check that the instructions are consistent#

Beyond a handful of instructions, two of them end up saying neighbouring, or opposite, things.

1. Go to Gen › Steering Instructions.
2. Check the instructions to examine, or check none of them to take them all.
3. Select Check Coherence in the Actions menu.
4. Read the report, which flags near duplicates and contradictions.
5. Correct or turn off the instructions involved.

The report changes nothing by itself: it flags, you decide. An instruction is turned off by clearing Active, which withdraws it from the composition without deleting it.

Follow the organization's conversations#

The administration screens serve to understand what is going on, not to read over people's shoulders.

1. Go to Gen › Administration › All Sessions.
2. Read the Title, User, Messages, Created, Last Activity and Active columns.
3. Open a conversation to see its messages in the Messages tab.

The tab gives the Role, the Content and the timestamp of each message. The Archive button puts the conversation away.

The menus, one by one#

The application bar shows three entries: Gen, Steering Instructions and Administration.

• Gen: the full-width chat page. On the left, your conversations with their date; on the right, the current exchange. The New Chat button opens one, from the column as well as from the centre of the page when nothing is selected.
• Gen › Steering Instructions: the house directives, with the Title, Scope, Record Type, Owner and Active columns. The screen is empty on the demo and shows its help text, which recalls that you keep one idea per instruction and restrict an instruction to a record type when it only makes sense there.
• Gen › Administration: grouping menu with no screen of its own, visible to administrators only.
• Gen › Administration › All Sessions: all the conversations of the instance, a single one on the demo. The columns say who spoke, how many messages were exchanged and when.

The Gen button of the top bar is not a menu entry, but it is the shortest path: it opens the side panel from any Symbifox screen.

Reference#

Fields of the Instruction form#

Fields of the Conversation form#

Reports and exports#

The application produces no report. A conversation is posted to a task as an internal note, which is the intended way to keep a shared trace of it. Lists export through Actions › Export.

Automations#

• The assistant opens by itself with a status update the first time the panel opens on a record with no conversation, when that setting is turned on. This request is made in your name and does not appear in the panel.
• The title of a conversation is suggested automatically from its content.
• A conversation whose answers fail several times in a row starts again on a fresh thread at the next message, instead of staying stuck. An administrator resets the counter to zero once the cause is understood.
• A long request returns what has already been produced rather than coming back empty-handed when the timeout is reached.

Public pages and portal#

The application has no public page and no portal page. It exposes addresses reserved for signed-in people, including those that serve the mobile app: a question asked from the phone is saved right away, processed in the background, then picked up by the device when it is ready. The phone therefore does not have to hold the connection open, and the device uses its existing mobile session rather than one more account. See Mobile apps and browser extension.

Modules that extend this application#

The next two modules sit underneath the assistant and have no menu of their own in Gen.

The last one works out of sight.

Understanding#

Why the answer is written as it goes. A request that triggers several searches takes time. Making someone wait in front of a frozen screen feels like an outage, and an answer lost at the end of the timeout means starting over. By writing as it goes, the assistant shows its work and keeps what has already been produced even if it does not have time to finish.

Why the panel filters by record. When you open the assistant from an invoice, last week's twenty conversations are of no use to you. The panel shows only what concerns the current record; the full-width page remains the place where everything can be found.

Why a fresh thread after several failures. An exchange can get stuck on content that makes every retry fail. Rather than leave a conversation broken for good, the assistant starts again on a fresh thread at the next message. The conversation stays readable; only the continuity with the model is cut.

Why consumption is visible. Artificial intelligence is paid for by use, and use is usually invisible until the bill arrives. The counters separate new work from reread context, which costs far less and inflates the totals without matching any effort. The cost shown is a yardstick against the public rate, not an invoice.

Why the key belongs to you. The subscription to the model provider is the organization's. Exchanges are therefore billed to its account, and the content travels between your server and the chosen provider, with no detour through an intermediary service. An instance without a key calls no one.

What the assistant does not do. It sends no email of its own initiative: it prepares a draft. It sees only what your account is allowed to see, since it acts under your identity. And it does not guess which organization is calling it: the setting that says so has no default value, precisely so that a badly set instance fails instead of answering with another organization's data.

Troubleshooting#

See also#

• Settings and brand identity
• Mobile apps and browser extension
• Discuss
• Project
• Helpdesk (tickets)
• Forge (no-code customization)