With the introduction of Codey, Google takes on GitHub Copilot. For Android developers there is Studio Bot.

To say that AI was a big topic on opening day of Google I/O 2023 is an understatement. We’re getting announcement after announcement about new AI-powered services in the vast Google ecosystem. Google’s search engine is getting an AI makeover, but the tech giant is also thinking about software developers with two new AI assistants: Codey and Studio Bot.

We’ll start with Codey. This AI tool is based on Google’s own PaLM 2 language model and is specially trained to convert natural language into code. Google claims to have used Codey, which is available as open source, to teach Codey the tricks of the trade. More than twenty programming languages ​​are supported at launch, including Go, Java, JavaScript, Python and SQL; A list that Google wants to expand.

Anyone who has been following AI news for a while will notice that Codey is actually a copy of GitHub Copilot, which has been available since last summer. You can also see Hugging Face and ServiceNow’s free StarCoder AI coding tool as direct competitors. Still, Codey can do something the rest can’t: it can also answer general questions about Google Cloud products.

Studio Bot

Google has its own coding assistant for Android developers: Studio Bot. Programming is done in Android Studio, the programming application for the mobile operating system. Studio Bot, unlike Copilot, is less proactive in interfering with your code, only taking action when you ask it a question. Google itself states that the tool is also better at answering general coding questions than code-specific questions.

There is still a lot of debate about AI-generated code. Experts assume that AI often produces unsafe code. Google therefore warns that the output of code and Studio Bot should always be checked. Both coding tools are available by invitation in the US. Google likes to take its time when introducing new AI products.