Google Cloud Launches Duet AI, a Coding AI Assistant

Highlights:

• The Duet AI assistant is accessible across various integrated development environments (IDEs), the applications developers employ for writing, testing, compiling, and deploying code.
• In addition to code generation, the AI assistant will also have the capability to elucidate code to developers, particularly useful when they receive a new project.

Google Cloud, the cloud division of Google LLC, today announced that Duet AI for Developers will provide software developers with generative artificial intelligence assistance in the environments and editors where they work.

With the general release of Duet AI for Developers, the technology juggernaut makes its foray into the AI-powered coding assistant market, competing with GitHub Inc.’s Copilot and Amazon.com Inc.’s CodeWhisperer. Since August, Duet AI for Workspace has been available to the general public. It now joins that platform. This offering is associated with a generative AI program that Google initially introduced in May as an early beta release of Duet AI for Cloud.

Chief Evangelist at Google Cloud, Richard Seroter, said in a press briefing, “Duet AI for Developers is this first foray that helps developers and site reliability engineers — it’s not just for devs. We are also trying to make sure that operators have some assistance with troubleshooting and best practices.”

The Duet AI assistant seamlessly integrates with various integrated development environments (IDEs), which are tools developers use for coding tasks such as writing, testing, compiling, and deploying code. Compatible IDEs include Cloud Shell Editor, Cloud Workstations, IntelliJ, PyCharm, and Visual Studio Code. Duet offers support for over 20 programming languages, including C, C , Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python.

Seroter outlined that the assistant delivers all the features a developer could desire from an AI coding companion, featuring a chat interface and code completion. It further aids in minimizing context switching by delivering knowledge directly to the programmer within their development environment. This ensures that developers can maintain their workflow without the need to exit while writing code. Developers can seamlessly transition to the chat with the AI assistant, pose questions or request code, and seamlessly return to their coding tasks.

It also remains unobtrusive, allowing the developer to manage the coding process without interference. “This is fully managed, you don’t think about installing things. It’s just fully activated in the cloud for the user,” said Seroter.

In addition to producing code, the AI assistant will also possess the capability of elucidating code to developers, a useful feature when a project has recently been delegated to them. Additionally, test cases can be generated directly from code; to do so, merely right-click on a code segment and instruct the AI to produce a test.

In the coming weeks, all Duet AI services will integrate Gemini, the largest and most powerful AI model recently unveiled by Google. Gemini possesses sophisticated coding and advanced reasoning capabilities.

Furthermore, users of Duet can tailor their models by incorporating their own codebases. This customization allows them to receive code suggestions specifically informed by their unique private code. This implies that the suggestions and code blocks offered will align with the conventions and practices distinctive to the enterprise. This feature is presently undergoing testing and is scheduled for release in the second quarter of 2024.

Seroter mentioned that Google is presently collaborating with an expanding network of partners who will supply datasets for code assistance and knowledge bases for Duet AI for Developers to enhance its capabilities. By leveraging insights from these partners, Duet’s AI assistance will offer additional support based on the partners’ coding and data models, product documentation, best practices, and other valuable resources.

Partners in code assistance, including Confluent Inc., HashiCorp Inc., and MongoDB Inc., have contributed platform-specific code to enable Duet to generate code tailored to those platforms. This empowers developers to accelerate their building and troubleshooting processes using familiar tools. Knowledge base partners such as Datadog Inc., JetBrains, and LangChain have provided documentation and partner-specific insights on resolving common production issues and automating tests for quality assurance.

Effective immediately, Duet AI for Developers is offered at no cost until February 1, 2024, following which it will transition to a subscription-based service. Software engineers and operations teams are encouraged to explore and experience its capabilities during this trial period.