Cory Gunther
App developers have used Android Studio for nearly a decade since its arrival in 2013, and at Google I/O 2023, Google announced several features to make it even better. That includes an all-new conversational AI chatbot to help devs build better apps and find poor code.
As expected, artificial intelligence (AI) is appearing everywhere. The new “Studio Bot” is an experimental feature still in its early days, but Google hopes it’ll eventually help developers write better code and create bug-free apps.
Android Studio’s new AI bot uses Codey, Google’s model for coding, and it’s full of helpful features. The AI helper can increase productivity, answer questions, and more.
Developers can lean on the bot to get help with specific situations, app fundamentals, and different elements or even ask simple questions like, “What is dark theme?” The Studio AI bot will conversationally answer questions, making exploring new tools and refining apps easier than ever.
More importantly, it sounds like developers can even ask the bot to help fix errors in existing code. Google’s AI tool will scan the code and offer suggestions for cleanup. So while it doesn’t look like AI is writing apps quite yet, that’s likely not far behind. Better yet, this is all built right into the Android Studio.
During the developer keynote, Google announced other changes, including live edits, Kotlin DSL and version catalogs for build scripts, new sync tools, per-app language preferences, emulator support for the WearOS 4 Developer Preview, a new power consumption profiler tool, layout inspectors, a new SDK upgrade assistant, and more.
While there are a lot of changes behind the scenes, beginners will want to take advantage of the new AI tools. For now, it sounds like the Studio AI bot is super experimental and only available in the beta builds. Google’s press release states it’ll be available with the Android Studio Hedgehog release.
Source: Android Developers
