Google Introduces Gemini in Android Studio for Coding Assistance

Google is expanding the reach of Gemini, its AI-powered technology, to various products, with the latest announcement introducing Gemini Pro to Android Studio’s bot.

Initially unveiled during the Google I/O developer event in May 2023, Studio Bot, powered by the PaLM-2 foundation model, is now receiving an upgrade with Gemini Pro. This rollout spans more than 180 countries for the Android Studio Jellyfish version.

In February, Google also enhanced the base model for the Bard chatbot from PaLM-2 to Gemini Pro.

Similar to Studio Bot, the new Gemini bot resides within the integrated development environment (IDE) of Android Studio, enabling developers to pose coding-related queries. Google assures developers will experience improved answer quality in code completions, debugging, resource retrieval, and documentation writing.

For privacy considerations, users must log in and explicitly enable Gemini to utilize it. Additionally, the chatbot’s responses heavily rely on the conversation history and context provided by the developer.

Google emphasizes that users can conveniently access the Gemini API starter template via Android Studio to integrate generative AI-powered features into their applications.

With the introduction of Gemini across its developer-facing products, Google is striving to compete with tools like GitHub Copilot. Last year, the company introduced the PaLM-2-based Codey assistant, aimed at addressing programming queries and Google Cloud Services.