Google jumps into the AI coding assistant fray with Codey and Studio Bot

During in the present day’s I/O presentation, Google introduced Studio Bot, an AI assistant that Android builders can use to assist write and debug code.

Built on Codey and the revised PaLM 2 giant language mannequin, Studio Bot is just accessible to US builders for now and is in its “very early days,” Google mentioned. It’s a part of Android Studio, Google’s official built-in growth surroundings (IDE) for Android devs.

This is distinct from one other Codey-based mission that’s meant to compete instantly with GitHub’s Copilot at finishing and producing in-line code.

Whereas Copilot is targeted on instantly analyzing the consumer’s code and making in-line recommendations, Studio Bot behaves equally to Bard or ChatGPT in that it’s a “conversational experience” that interacts with you as a kind of advisor. A promotional video saying Studio Bot depicted a developer asking it, “What is dark theme” (as if any self-respective developer would not know that) and then doing follow-up queries to get code snippets to implement darkish theme in the developer’s app.

You haven’t got to offer Studio Bot any of your code to ask it issues. In truth, Google’s positioning means that, at the least for now, it is higher suited to answering normal API questions and the like than digging in and serving to you construct stuff instantly.

Google warns in its developer-facing documentation that “Studio Bot is still an early experiment, and might sometimes provide inaccurate, misleading or false information while presenting it confidently. Studio Bot might give you working code that doesn’t produce the expected output, or provide you with code that is not optimal or incomplete.”

This wasn’t the solely I/O announcement related to builders. As famous briefly above, Google additionally introduced plans to launch a Codey-based code era device that’s extra akin to Copilot. Codey-based instruments like these work with JavaScript, Java, Python, SQL, and Go. This is an element of a bigger initiative to AI-ify just about all of Google Cloud and Google’s different growth instruments and companies over time.

Google additionally launched ML Hub, a repository of steerage for builders who’re looking for to coach and use machine studying fashions of their work. And a brand new experimental AI function on the Play Store will permit builders to generate copy for app listings, analyze, and summarize consumer opinions of apps, and extra.