Google Rebrands Studio Bot to Gemini in Android Studio

Google announced today that it has rebranded Studio Bot to Gemini in Android Studio and enhanced it with the Gemini 1.0 Pro model.

“Gemini in Android Studio is an AI-powered coding assistant which can be accessed directly in the IDE,” Google product manager Sandhya Mohan writes in the announcement post. “It can accelerate your ability to develop high-quality Android apps faster by helping generate code for your app, providing complex code completions, answering your questions, finding relevant resources, adding code comments and more — all without ever having to leave Android Studio.”

Gemini in Android Studio is available in over 180 countries and territories in the release candidate version of Android Studio Jellyfish. (The current version is Android Studio Iguana.) Google announced the tool (as Studio Bot) at Google I/O in May 2023 and expanded access to it in pre-release in September.

Developers can ask Gemini in Android Studio questions in natural language using a chat window in the IDE, and like other AI chatbots, it remembers the context of a conversation so you can ask follow-up questions as well. It provides AI-powered code completion capabilities and comments suggestions, and can add documentation to your code.

From a privacy perspective, Gemini in Android Studio must be enabled first, and it uses only your conversation history for context by default. Those who wish to receive more customized responses can also share additional context. And you can manually opt out specific folders and files.

Developers can also use Android Studio to create new generative AI apps using a new Gemini API Starter project template that targets the Gemini models and supports both image and text inputs (i.e. is multimodal).

Gemini in Android Studio is free while the product is still in preview. And while it’s not clear when that ends, the release schedule of the previous few releases suggests that Google will ship Android Studio Jellyfish by mid-summer. So this might be a good time to get started.

You can learn more on the Android Developers website.