Google has announced a major milestone for Duet AI for Developers, the suite of AI-powered assistance tools aimed at simplifying code completion and generation. After its initial debut earlier this year, the company has now made the suite generally available to the public, with plans to integrate its more advanced Gemini model in the coming weeks.
Code completion and generation tools have rapidly gained popularity among developers. Leading the pack is GitHub’s Copilot, which has captivated the minds of tech enthusiasts. However, Google is taking a unique approach by collaborating with 25 companies. These key players have contributed invaluable datasets to boost the capabilities of Duet AI and aid developers in building and troubleshooting their applications. Some of the notable partners include Confluent, HashiCorp, and MongoDB, who will provide essential data for training the AI to assist with coding for their respective platforms.
“I still pretend to be a developer and lead a team of engineers who do developer relations and all of our documentation,” explains Richard Seroter, Chief Evangelist for Google Cloud, during a press briefing. “We get to see every day, there’s still plenty of toil, there’s still plenty of hard things about software. How can AI help get rid of that boilerplate, things that we don’t like to do? How do we make coding better? That’s been a lot of what we’ve been chasing with this. How do we build a sort of AI assistant that meets our developers in the tools they use, but also rubs a little Google on it?”
So, how exactly does Google “rub a bit of Google” on these tools? One way is by constantly training the model with the latest cloud-native practices, making sure Duet AI stays up-to-date. Additionally, the suite will be integrated into the Google Cloud Console, in addition to the most popular integrated development environments (IDEs) that developers are already familiar with.
Seroter emphasizes that Google views the entire Duet AI family as an enterprise-grade product. With features like enterprise access controls and Google’s indemnification guarantee, the suite is equipped for enterprises to incorporate these tools into their production processes.
Like many other AI coding tools, Google’s ultimate goal is to enhance the developer experience and increase productivity. Seroter highlights the benefits of code completion for developers, allowing them to stay in their “flow” while coding. While Duet AI will never replace the need for coding skills, it can undoubtedly make developers more efficient. Companies like GitHub have already reported significant gains in productivity after implementing AI coding tools, and Google is likely to release similar data in the future. For now, the company has shared that Turing, an ‘AI-powered tech services company’, experienced a 33% productivity increase after adopting Duet AI for Developers.
Duet AI for Developers currently supports over 20 programming languages, including C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Python. Beyond coding assistance, the suite also offers features like AI log summarization and error explanation, integrated with Google’s Cloud Logging. It also includes Smart Actions, which allows for one-click shortcuts to perform various tasks, such as generating unit tests.
For interested developers, Duet AI for Developers will be available for free until January 2024, after which it will cost $19 per user per month with an annual commitment.
