Android Studio’s AI assistant

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At its I/O conference, Google announced Studio Bot, an AI assistant that helps Android developers write and debug code. Studio Bot is just starting out and is currently available only to developers in the US via the Canary channel. It is built on Codey, a new generative AI model specialized in programming, and on a new version of the Pathways Language Model (PaLM). In its documentation, Google warns 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.” The tool is part of Android Studio, which is Google’s official integrated development environment (IDE) for Android developers. Studio Bot feels a lot like ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Bard (Google), in that it offers a “conversational experience” that acts as a kind of advisor.

Google also announced that it will shortly launch a more multipurpose code-generation tool compatible with JavaScript, Java, Python, SQL and Go. It will also be based on Codey and it will be similar to Copilot (OpenAI and GitHub).

⇨ YouTube, “Meet Studio Bot - the AI powered coding assistant in Android Studio”

⇨ Ars Technica, Samuel Axon, “Google jumps into the AI coding assistant fray with Codey and Studio Bot.”

2023-05-10