Google Colab, the company’s Python development environment hosted on the cloud, is set to receive new enhancements, including an AI coding chatbot. This move extends Bard’s AI coding capabilities to Colab and aims to augment the programming experience.
Google revealed that the new chatbot, tailored for coding assistance and the capacity to generate code through natural language, is powered by Codey, an AI model focused on coding and built on the foundation of PaLM 2.
In the early stages, Codey models will only be accessible to users in the US within Colab. Google’s initial feature rollout will primarily emphasize code generation, intending to improve coding speed, accuracy, and understanding substantially. Moreover, this development will eradicate the need to input identical code repeatedly. Once the feature is live, qualifying Colab users will see a ‘Generate’ button and a text prompt box.
In addition to this, Google plans to bring a new chatbot to Colab shortly. Although the exact timeline remains undisclosed, it is expected to launch in the near future. The forthcoming chatbot is poised to support both novices and experts by addressing basic queries such as importing data from Google Sheets and filtering a Pandas DataFrame, thereby enriching the overall AI interaction.
Notably, users no longer need to construct code on Google’s chatbot and subsequently transfer it to Colab. Nonetheless, Google may utilize any code produced via chatbot prompts for model improvement purposes.
Further enhancing the experience for Colab’s “eligible” premium subscribers will be an autocomplete feature. It will propose code as users type, saving time and minimizing keystrokes, especially when handling extensive lines of code.
Google stated that these new features will be gradually rolled out in the coming months, beginning with paid users in the US. Google’s roadmap includes plans to expand these functionalities to other regions, and free Colab subscribers will also gain access at a later stage.
