GitHub Copilot Chat AI feature now comes to public beta

GitHub has announced that its new feature Copilot Chat, a ChatGPT-like experience designed to help developers with coding, is now available as a limited public beta for enterprises and organizations. GitHub says that the beta version of Copilot Chat will be available to "all business users" through Microsoft's Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code apps.

The chatbot was announced in March as the cornerstone of GitHub's Copilot X initiative, an expansion of its original Copilot code completion tool that integrated with OpenAI's GPT-4 model. The tool aims to save developers time by allowing them to "execute some of the more complex tasks with simple prompts."

According to GitHub, Copilot Chat is aware of the context of the code being written in the code editor and any error messages, which should help provide the most relevant support within a developer-specific environment. Critical features of GitHub Copilot Chat include real-time guidance tailored to specific coding projects, coding analysis that explains code hints and complex coding concepts, and "simple troubleshooting" to identify potential issues.

In a blog post announcing the beta, Mario Rodriguez, VP of Products at GitHub, makes some bold claims about Copilot X's potential to increase developer productivity. According to Rodríguez, the software will allow even inexperienced developers to build "entire applications or debug large sets of code in a matter of minutes instead of days" and improve efficiency tenfold. "This means 10 days of work, done in one day," said Rodriguez. "10 hours of work, done in one hour. 10 minutes of work, done with a single prompt command."

Copilot Chat isn't the only feature being developed for GitHub's new Copilot X system. The company is also working to bring its "Hey, GitHub!" Voice-to-code interactions with software, for example. GitHub says it is preparing to release the remaining features of Copilot X but has not provided a release schedule. We have asked GitHub for clarification and will update this story if we hear back.