GitHub announces availability of GitHub Copilot Chat beta to all businesses

Microsoft-owned GitHub today said that its generative artificial intelligence tool GitHub Copilot Chat is available to all enterprises through a limited public beta for businesses on Visual Studio and VS Code. The Copilot Chat is a central feature of GitHub Copilot X.

To be sure, GitHub Copilot X was first announced in March, ‘designed to bring the power of generative AI and GPT-4 throughout the entire developer experience on GitHub’. It features a ChatGPT-like chat window that gives context-aware answers to developer queries, provides documentation,  and offers explanation and analysis of code blocks. The Copilot chat can also make suggestions for reducing the number of vulnerabilities found in security scans.

“We want to help developers spend their time on what matters most: building what’s next. And this work started with GitHub Copilot offering code suggestions right in the IDE — but now with Copilot Chat, developers can not only get code suggestions, but ask questions, get explanations, offer prompts for code, and more. That means they’re spending more time in the IDE — and in the flow,” said Mario Rodriguez, vice president of product at GitHub.

Rodriguez also said that with GitHub Copilot X, developers can be made ten times more productive, which means ‘ten days of work, done in one day. Ten hours of work, done in one hour. Ten minutes of work, done with a single prompt command’. He added that it will help a new generation of developers learn and build at the speed of thought.

“We firmly believe AI will transform the way the world builds software, leading to increased productivity and most importantly, happier developers. We are confident that Copilot adheres to applicable laws and we’ve been committed to innovating responsibly with Copilot from the start. We will continue to invest in and advocate for the AI-powered developer experience of the future,” Rodriguez told TechCircle in response to a question about potential copyright issues.