Android Studio gets a built-in coding bot

1 year ago 113

Android Studio, like so much of Google’s product portfolio, is getting its infusion of AI today at the company’s annual I/O developer conference. Android Studio Hedgehog, the upcoming version of Android Studio currently in the canary release channel, will be the first to add support for the here., a new conversational experience in Android Studio meant to help developers write code and fix bugs and answer more general coding questions.

Built on top of Codey, Google’s new PaLM 2-based foundation model specifically trained for coding, the Studio Bot will roll out to developers in the U.S. first, with a wider rollout expected over time.

Image Credits: Google

Google notes that it built this new bot with privacy in mind. None of the source code is shared with Google, though the chat between the developer and the bot obviously is.

The company also stresses that it’s still very early days for the Studio Bot and that it is still training it to become better at answering developers’ questions. One of the advantages for Google here, though, is that the set of questions developers will ask inside of Android Studio is obviously limited, allowing it to create a system that is finely tuned to answer questions about only a few programming languages, for example.

It’s worth noting that Google is also rolling out a Codey-based code completion and generation service that competes with GitHub’s Copilot or Amazon’s CodeWhisperer and which can be integrated into VSCode, JetBrains’ IDEs and Google’s own Cloud shell. It’s a bit odd that Google decided to give this Android Studio version its own brand, but in a way, that’s par for the course for Google branding.