Tips and Tricks for Building Great Bots

I recently had the opportunity to team up with Vinay Mistry and Olivier Poupeney from Symphony’s Platform Solutions team for a fireside chat on building bots. The Platform Solutions team has spent the last couple of years helping some of the largest companies in the world design their automation strategies, and given the number of attendees, there’s huge interest in the topic from our growing developer community.

Efficiency Gains Driven by Bots 

Customers want faster execution and lower costs and Bots make that possible. We see a hierarchy of value that automations bring to the business. At the lowest level, customers are automating repetitive tasks like account creation or the assignment of entitlements. Next, they’re implementing workflows and trade flows where the user types their instructions directly into chat conversations.

But even more business value is provided with interactive interfaces using buttons and other UI elements. And because Symphony provides secure and compliant external communications between companies, the biggest value is coming from externally facing Bots either providing their services to external users or by interacting with the external firm’s own Bots.

Bot-to-Bot communication like this is driving very significant efficiency gains, but additional care should be taken when designing the solution – this is why we thought it would be useful to share best practices and common pitfalls developers should be aware of.

Bot Structure

We recommend the Bot server be located close to the Agent server (the Agent acts as a secure proxy between Bots and Symphony’s secure communications service). If the Bot will be interacting with databases or other applications, then these should also be easily reachable.

The Bot itself will typically have the following code structure: