GitHub Copilot Chat is Now Available in Beta

GitHub announced that all GitHub Copilot for Business users now have access to a limited GitHub Copilot Chat beta that brings conversational AI-based coding assistance right into Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

“We’re excited to take a first step in bringing GitHub Copilot X to enterprise companies and organizations with a limited public beta release of GitHub Copilot Chat for all business users on Visual Studio and VS Code,” GitHub’s Mario Rodriguez writes in the announcement post. “This new evolution turns GitHub Copilot into a context-aware conversational assistant right in the IDE, allowing developers to execute some of the most complex tasks with simple prompts.”

Stepping back for a moment, GitHub announced Microsoft’s first AI-powered “copilot” product, called GitHub Copilot, in June 2022, letting developers use natural language prompts in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and other popular editors to get suggestions going from individual lines of codes to complete functions at $10 per month or $100 per year. It then followed that up with GitHub Copilot for Business this past February, a $19 per month offering that expanded this tool to teams of developers. GitHub Copilot X arrived a month later in technical preview form, adding ChatGPT-4 functionality with chat and voice interfaces, pull request support, and answers to questions.

GitHub Copilot Chat beta is the firm’s first step in making the ChatGPT-4-based GitHub Copilot X vision a product reality for enterprises with developer teams. And it promises to help developers reduce the amount of time it takes to build entire applications or debug vast arrays of code from days to just minutes.

“We believe Copilot Chat will swing the doors wide open to a new age where natural language powers the coding experience, democratizing software development as we know it and making entire teams of developers happier and more productive,” Rodriguez explains. “63 percent of developers say they spend at least 30 minutes a day and up to two hours looking for answers and solutions … We want to help developers spend their time on what matters most: building what’s next.”