In July, the Microsoft-owned code and developer site GitHub announced it had launched a public beta of its GitHub Copilot Chat service for enterprise companies and organizations. In September, the public beta was extended to individual users.
Today, GitHub announced that GitHub Copilot Chat will become generally available for both businesses and individuals in December as part of the current GitHub Copilot subscription.
In a blog post, GitHub stated:
With GitHub Copilot Chat we’re enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet. Whether it’s finding an error, writing unit tests, or helping debug code, Copilot Chat is your AI companion through it all, allowing you to write and understand code using whatever language you speak.
The service will also be free to use for teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open-source software projects. It will be integrated into both the GitHub.com website and also in the GitHub mobile app.
In addition, in February 2024, the service will launch GitHub Copilot Enterprise which will offer businesses customized and personalized AI code creation and assistance. The blog states:
With Copilot Chat connected to your repositories on github.com, Copilot Enterprise allows your teams of developers to quickly get up to speed on your codebase, search through and build documentation, get suggestions based on internal and private code, and quickly review pull requests.
GitHub Copilot Enterprise will cost $39 per person per month when it launches.
Finally, GitHub announced yet another upcoming AI-based feature called Copilot Workspace. It will allow developers who have an issue written into GitHub a faster way to solve it. The blog post states:
When you open an issue in Copilot Workspace, you’re presented with an automatically proposed plan for how to implement the intended change. Because the workspace is fully editable, you’re able to steer the AI in the exact direction you want, while benefiting from its understanding of the issue’s intent, and your entire codebase. To validate that the change behaves as expected, Copilot Workspace enables you to build, run and test the code.
Copilot Workspace will launch sometime in 2024.