Symfony AI in Action

At first AI is a ton of buzzwords and hype, but how do we integrate AI in our existing products / software projects in a meaningful and realistic manner?
Let's have a look how Symfony AI enables us to bring AI-based or even agentic features, not only chatbots, into our PHP applications or scaled architecture.
If you are looking for input on how to approach AI, need ideas where to get started or find out what's realistic at first - let this talk be your inspiration!

Talk given at SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025:
https://live.symfony.com/2025-amsterdam-con/schedule/practical-ai-integrations-with-symfony

Transcript

1. I N A C T I O N 1
2. Christopher Hertel Software Engineer in Berlin Focus on PHP, Symfony and GenAI Working on Tech Program of 2
3. Follow the Slides 3
4. Initiative 4
5. Initiative Published July 2025 symfony/ai Symfony Standards Experimental 5
6. Idea Enable AI Features Not only LLMs PHP Components Vendor Agnostic 6
7. Stats 775 GitHub Stars 73 Contributors ~2000 Commits 71 Packages 7
8. Components 8
9. Features 9
10. Platform composer require symfony/ai-platform 10
11. Platform Component Abstraction Layer for Model Platforms Central Interface for Inference Model Platform Bridges Multi-Modal Compatible Integrated Event System 11
12. Platform Component 12
13. Platform Component 13
14. Platform Component 14
15. Platform Component 15
16. Platform Component 16
17. Platform Component 17
18. Model Inference use Symfony\AI\Platform\Bridge\OpenAi\PlatformFactory; use Symfony\AI\Platform\Message\{Message, MessageBag}; $platform = PlatformFactory::create($apiKey); $input = new MessageBag( Message::forSystem('You are a pirate and you write funny.'), Message::ofUser('What is the Symfony framework?'), ); $result = $platform->invoke('gpt-5-mini', $input); echo $result->asText(); 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19. OpenAI GPT use Symfony\AI\Platform\Bridge\OpenAi\PlatformFactory; $result = $platform->invoke('gpt-5-mini', $input); 5 use Symfony\AI\Platform\Message\{Message, MessageBag}; 6 7 $platform = PlatformFactory::create($apiKey); 8 9 $input = new MessageBag( 10 Message::forSystem('You are a pirate and you write funny.'), 11 Message::ofUser('What is the Symfony framework?'), 12 ); 13 14 15 16 echo $result->asText(); 17 19
20. Anthropic Claude use Symfony\AI\Platform\Bridge\Anthropic\PlatformFactory; $result = $platform->invoke('claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929', $input); 5 use Symfony\AI\Platform\Message\{Message, MessageBag}; 6 7 $platform = PlatformFactory::create($apiKey); 8 9 $input = new MessageBag( 10 Message::forSystem('You are a pirate and you write funny.'), 11 Message::ofUser('What is the Symfony framework?'), 12 ); 13 14 15 16 echo $result->asText(); 17 20
21. Google Gemini use Symfony\AI\Platform\Bridge\Gemini\PlatformFactory; $result = $platform->invoke('gemini-3-pro-preview', $input); 5 use Symfony\AI\Platform\Message\{Message, MessageBag}; 6 7 $platform = PlatformFactory::create($apiKey); 8 9 $input = new MessageBag( 10 Message::forSystem('You are a pirate and you write funny.'), 11 Message::ofUser('What is the Symfony framework?'), 12 ); 13 14 15 16 echo $result->asText(); 17 21
22. Mistral use Symfony\AI\Platform\Bridge\Mistral\PlatformFactory; $result = $platform->invoke('mistral-large-latest', $input); 5 use Symfony\AI\Platform\Message\{Message, MessageBag}; 6 7 $platform = PlatformFactory::create($apiKey); 8 9 $input = new MessageBag( 10 Message::forSystem('You are a pirate and you write funny.'), 11 Message::ofUser('What is the Symfony framework?'), 12 ); 13 14 15 16 echo $result->asText(); 17 22
23. Streaming $result = $platform->invoke('mistral-large-latest', $input, [ 'stream' => true, ]); foreach ($result->asStream() as $word) { echo $word; } $input = new MessageBag( 10 Message::forSystem('You are a pirate and you write funny.'), 11 Message::ofUser('What is the Symfony framework?'), 12 ); 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 23
24. Audio, Image & PDF Input $input = new MessageBag( Message::ofUser( 'Describe the audio file.', Audio::fromDataUrl('data:audio/mpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQ...'), ), ); $result = $platform->invoke('gemini-2.5-flash', $input); echo $result->asText(); 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Message::ofUser( 'Describe the audio file.', Audio::fromDataUrl('data:audio/mpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQ...'), ), $input = new MessageBag( 10 11 12 13 14 ); 15 16 $result = $platform->invoke('gemini-2.5-flash', $input); 17 18 echo $result->asText(); 19 24
25. Audio, Image & PDF Input Message::ofUser( 'What is visible on the image?', new ImageUrl('https://example.org/elephant.jpg'), ), $input = new MessageBag( 10 11 12 13 14 ); 15 16 $result = $platform->invoke('gemini-2.5-flash', $input); 17 18 echo $result->asText(); 19 25
26. Audio, Image & PDF Input Message::ofUser( 'Describe the content of the PDF file.', Document::fromFile('/path/to/document.pdf'), ), $input = new MessageBag( 10 11 12 13 14 ); 15 16 $result = $platform->invoke('gemini-2.5-flash', $input); 17 18 echo $result->asText(); 19 26
27. Structured Output Message::forSystem('Help users as math tutor, step by step.'), Message::ofUser('how can I solve 8x + 7 = -23'), ); $input = new MessageBag( 10 11 12 13 14 $result = $platform->invoke('mistral-small-latest', $messages, [ 15 'response_format' => MathReasoning::class, 16 ]); 17 18 echo $result->asObject(); 19 'response_format' => MathReasoning::class, $input = new MessageBag( 10 Message::forSystem('Help users as math tutor, step by step.'), 11 Message::ofUser('how can I solve 8x + 7 = -23'), 12 ); 13 14 $result = $platform->invoke('mistral-small-latest', $messages, [ 15 16 ]); 17 18 echo $result->asObject(); 19 echo $result->asObject(); $input = new MessageBag( 10 Message::forSystem('Help users as math tutor, step by step.'), 11 Message::ofUser('how can I solve 8x + 7 = -23'), 12 ); 13 14 $result = $platform->invoke('mistral-small-latest', $messages, [ 15 'response_format' => MathReasoning::class, 16 ]); 17 18 19 27
28. Structured Output 28
29. Embeddings Models Semantic Vectors are LLMs little sibling $result = $platform->invoke('text-embedding-3-small', $text); echo $result->asVector(); // array of floats 29
30. Hugging Face Integration with Hugging Face's Inference Hub API use Symfony\AI\Platform\Bridge\HuggingFace\Task; $result = $platform->invoke('facebook/detr-resnet-50', $image, [ 'task' => Task::OBJECT_DETECTION, ]); echo $result->asObject(); // image classification result 30
31. Platform Bridges 25 Platform Bridges already, and more to come ... 31
32. AI Bundle composer require symfony/ai-bundle 32
33. AI Bundle composer require ai 33
34. Bundle Configuration # config/packages/ai.yaml ai: platform: openai: # or anthropic, azure, google, more to come ... api_key: '%env(OPENAI_API_KEY)%' agent: default: model: 'gpt-4o-mini' prompt: 'You are a pirate and you write funny.' # more options ... store: chroma_db: symfonycon: collection: 'symfony_blog' # multi_agent, indexer, vectorizer ... 34
35. Agent composer require symfony/ai-agent 35
36. Agent Component Multi-Step Interaction with Model Combination of Things Platform & Model Collection of Messages/Prompts as Context Memory, Tools, and more Various Architectures From static workflows to autonomous orchestration 36
37. Agent Component 37
38. Agent Component 38
39. Tool Calling App Provides Tools Exposed to tool via JSON Schema definition as part of API call Model Invokes Tool As an intermediate response the model invokes a tool (or multiple) Tool Result Result of tool call provided as next call to model Instrumentation Log and analyze tool calls, model invocations, and results 39
40. Uhm, but how? bin/console ai:agent:call default Let's try it out! 40
41. Tool Calling use Symfony\AI\Agent\Toolbox\Attribute\AsTool; use Symfony\Component\Clock\ClockInterface; #[AsTool('cookbook_create_recipe', 'Creates a new recipe in the cookbook.')] final readonly class CookbookCreateRecipe { public function __construct(private EntityManagerInterface $clock) {} /** * @param Recipe $recipe The recipe to create in the cookbook. */ public function __invoke(Recipe $recipe): string { // validate & persist recipe ... return 'Recipe created successfully!'; } } 41
42. Agent Tool Bridges 9 Agent Tool Bridges already, and more to come ... 42
43. Agentic Application 43
44. Multi-Agent Architectures Level of Autonomy & Context Sharing Implemented Workflows Solved in user land Subagents as Tools Defined subtask & isolated context Orchestration with Handoff Central orchestrator agent & handsoff with context to subagents 44
45. Subagent as Tool # config/packages/ai.yaml ai: # Platform Configuration ... agent: researcher: model: 'gpt-4o' prompt: 'You do heavy research.' smalltalker: model: 'gpt-4o-mini' tools: # Agent as tool 🤯 - agent: 'researcher' name: 'research_topic' description: 'Does research on a given topic.' 45
46. Orchestration # config/packages/ai.yaml ai: # Platform Configuration ... agent: orchestrator: { # agent config ... } technical: { # agent config ... } billing: { # agent config ... } fallback: { # agent config ... } multi_agent: support: orchestrator: 'orchestrator' handoffs: technical: ['bug', 'error', 'code', 'debug'] billing: ['invoice', 'payment', 'bill', 'order'] fallback: 'fallback' 46
47. RAG 47
48. Retrieval Augmented Generation 48
49. Store composer require symfony/ai-store 49
50. Store Component Vector Store Abstraction Layer Lifecycle Management Adding & Querying for Documents Document Indexing Pipeline 1. Loading 2. Filtering 3. Transforming 4. Vectorizing 50
51. Store Component Credits @OskarStark 51
52. Store Bridges 18 Platform Bridges already, and more to come ... 52
53. Demo 53
54. Symfony AI Demo Application github.com/symfony/ai-demo 54
55. Roadmap 55
56. Roadmap Tagged Release Stable Components Feature Depth Collaborations 56
57. Symfony AI Roadmap Multi-Agent Architectures Agent Tracing & Benchmarking Tools More Bridges for Platform, Store & Tools MCP Integration into Agent Support for Protocols like A2A & AG-UI Integration with PHP-ORT extension 57
58. PHP-ORT (Oh Really, Tensors) High-Performance Tensor Mathematics Hardware Acceleration with CPU/GPT Support Compatible with ONNX Enabling Native PHP Model Inference Active Development by Joe Watkins and the PHP Foundation 58
59. Only my plans, but what about you? 59
60. Already over 70 contributors! Thank You All! 60
61. Join Symfony AI Initiative Checkout symfony/ai repository Especially examples/ and demo/ folders Build your first feature & give feedback Join SymfonyCon Hackathon this Saturday See you there or on GitHub.com! 61
62. T H A N K YO U 62
63. Q U E S T I O N S ? 63