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 conversation experience in Android Studio intended to help developers write code and debug bugs. solve and answer more general coding questions.
Built on top of Codey, Google’s new PaLM 2-based base model trained specifically for coding, the Studio Bot will be the first to roll out to developers in the US, 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, although the chat between the developer and the bot clearly is.
The company also emphasizes that it is still very early days for the Studio Bot and is still training to become better at answering developer questions. One of the benefits for Google here, though, is that the range of questions developers will ask in Android Studio is clearly limited, allowing it to create a system fine-tuned to answer questions about just 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 rivals GitHub’s Copilot or Amazon’s CodeWhisperer and integrates into VSCode, JetBrains’ IDEs, and Google’s own Cloud shell. It’s a bit odd that Google decided to brand this Android Studio version, but in a way that’s part of Google branding.
