Google's Bard AI tool now helps developers with programming tasks

Google's conversational AI tool, Bard, is now capable of assisting software developers with programming. The new set of skills was added due to user demand, as coding has been one of the top requests Google has received.

In a blog post on Friday, Google Research product lead Paige Bailey stated that Bard can help generate code, debug, and explain code. The software development capabilities are available in more than 20 programming languages, including C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript. Bard can also write functions for Google Sheets and export Python code to Google Colab.

Bard, which was launched earlier this year to compete with ChatGPT and other language models, can now review and help users debug their source code line by line. Users can tell Bard to fix code that didn't work, and it will help debug. It can also translate code from one language to another and explain code snippets, making it a helpful feature for those new to programming.

Despite the new capabilities, Bailey cautioned that Bard is still an early experiment and "may sometimes provide inaccurate, misleading or false information while presenting it confidently." For instance, Bard may give developers working code that is incomplete or doesn't produce the expected output. Nonetheless, the new set of skills could help Bard keep up with ChatGPT and Claude, at least on paper.

Google's new capabilities for Bard offer new ways to write code, create test cases, or update APIs. Bard quotes from an existing open-source project, it will cite the source, Bailey wrote. It remains to be seen how well Bard is able to create, translate and debug code, but it is a promising development in the field of AI-assisted programming.