GitHub Copilot Chat is Now Available

Microsoft’s GitHub announced today that GitHub Copilot Chat is now available to all GitHub Copilot users at no additional cost.

“A core piece of our AI-powered developer platform is GitHub Copilot Chat, which enables the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language,” GitHub’s Shuyin Zhao writes in the announcement post. “Today, GitHub Copilot Chat is now generally available for both Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio, and is included in all GitHub Copilot plans alongside the original GitHub Copilot productivity boosting code completion capabilities. It is also available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.”

GitHub Copilot Chat is a ChatGPT 4-powered contextually-aware AI assistant designed specifically for software development needs. Individuals and teams can prompt it using the natural language of their choice and receive help in real time without leaving their integrated development environment (IDE) of choice. It can explain complex coding concepts, translate code into different programming languages, detect security vulnerabilities in code, and write unit tests, among other things, GitHub says.

This release follows a beta from this past July.

To get started with GitHub Copilot Chat, check out the documentation on GitHub Docs. It requires an active GitHub Copilot subscription, which is available to individuals for $10 per month or $100 per year, and to business users for $19 per user per month. You can learn more about pricing on the GitHub Docs website.