Microsoft-owned GitHub has introduced significant upgrades to AI pair programmer Copilot system today. The upgrade is part of a broader vision called “Copilot X,” which integrates OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 model and introduces chat and voice support to the AI pair programmer.
Copilot X includes a new chatbot-like experience inside code editors, which can recognize and explain code, and recommend changes. The interface natively integrates with VS Code and Visual Studio to do more than suggesting code. It identifies the code entered by the developer, what error messages are shown, and it’s deeply embedded into the IDE. “A developer can get in-depth analysis and explanations of what code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests, and even get proposed fixes to bugs,” company writes in its official blog post.
GitHub Copilot Chat is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to help developers write code more efficiently. It is built on the technology developed by OpenAI and Microsoft, including ChatGPT and Bing. Additionally, it will now also include GitHub Copilot Voice which is a voice-to-code AI technology extension allows developers to give voice commands to generate code.
The upgrade adds a new functionality that uses OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 model to automatically generate descriptions for pull requests. This feature allows developers to install a GitHub app that will automatically generate tags in the pull request description based on the changes made to the code. These tags are created by GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered tool that suggests descriptions for the pull request. Developers can review and modify these suggestions before finalizing the pull request.
GitHub says it is also internally testing new capabilities for GitHub Copilot that will automatically suggest sentences and paragraphs as developers create pull requests by dynamically pulling in information about code changes.
Additionally, the company is also readying a new feature where “GitHub Copilot will automatically warn developers if they’re missing sufficient testing for a pull request and then suggest potential tests that can be edited, accepted, or rejected based on a project’s needs.”
GitHub is also bringing an experimental tool called GitHub Copilot for Docs which uses a chat interface to provide users with AI-generated responses to questions about documentation-including questions developers have about the languages, frameworks, and technologies they’re using. The company is starting with documentation for React, Azure Docs, and MDN.
