Google provides Android Studio with an AI bot that can automatically write code. The competitor of CoPilot, among others, is only available to American developers and is still in an early stage, Google warns.
The bot is called Studio Bot. Google announced the generative code AI at developer conference I/O. Studio Bot is an “early experiment” available only for American developers, says Google. The bot integrates into Android Studio and can be used to write code for the mobile operating system. Studio Bot is in the Canary version of Hedgehog. It is not known when a final version will be available for international users.
Studio Bot is a chatbot that developers can use natural language to ask questions to. As an example, Google gives the question: “How can a developer add camera support to an app?” The bot then provides an explanation of the process, but can also automatically write the code for it. Context-sensitive menus then appear that allow you to place the code directly in an editor in the IDE or to immediately integrate the necessary dependencies.
Google warns that the bot can still make mistakes. Studio Bot is based on PaLM 2, a new version of Google’s language model that Google announced during the developer conference. PaLM 2 is also used for Bard and future AI applications, among others.
The model is trained on ‘a curated dataset’ that, according to Google, follows best practices for Android development. According to the company, the training data does not come from users. Even if developers use the chatbot, the generated or self-written code from Android Studio is not used to further train the chatbot. While anything written in the chat window is sent to Google’s servers, it is not used for training purposes.