Google's AI Bard chatbot adds coding skills to assist software developers

Google's conversation AI tool Bard has expanded its capabilities to help software developers with programming tasks such as generating code, debugging, and code explanation.

Google said that coding was one of the top requests from users for the AI tool, which was launched earlier this year. Bard can now review and help users debug their source code line by line, translate code from one language to another, and explain code snippets, a feature particularly useful for those new to programming.

These software development capabilities are being launched in over 20 programming languages, including Python, C++, and Java. Despite still being an early experiment, Google believes that Bard's new capabilities can offer new ways to write code, create test cases, or update APIs.