Google Launches an AI Coding Bot for Android developers
Google has unveiled Studio Bot, an AI-powered coding tool designed to assist Android developers with generating code, fixing errors, and answering questions about Android.
The bot will be built on Codey, Google’s new foundational coding model that has emerged from its updated PaLM 2 large language model.
Studio Bot supports both Kotlin and Java programming languages and will live directly in the toolbar on Android Studio. Developers can quickly get answers to their questions or have the bot debug a portion of their code.
However, Google stated that it will receive data on the conversations developers have with the tool.
Although Studio Bot is only available to developers in the US for now via the Canary channel, it is expected to see a global launch soon. The bot is still in its early stages, but Google plans to continue training it to improve its answers.
This AI-powered tool is part of Google’s push into AI, following the release of its Bard chatbot earlier this year, which can generate, debug, and explain lines of code.
This new standalone coding assistant, Studio Bot, puts Google in competition with Microsoft and Amazon, which have AI-powered coding tools that developers can integrate into various integrated development environments.
Microsoft has rolled out a ChatGPT-like assistant to GitHub Copilot, while Amazon made CodeWhisperer available to developers for free last month.
However, Studio Bot has a more limited reach than Amazon and GitHub’s integrative coding assistants since it’s only useful for Android developers. Nonetheless, Google’s new Duet AI coding tool, which is available to Google Cloud users, is expected to help fill that gap.
