Google has announced Codey, a new AI-powered tool designed to write and understand code. The new tool is being seen as Google’s answer to GitHub Copilot and has been made possible due to a recent alliance with Replit.

Codey is based on Google’s next-gen large language model PaLM 2. Google’s own product code and a generous amount of legally licensed source code were used as training material to make Codey what it is today. What’s more, Codey continues to learn and evolve, gleaning new insights from the ongoing projects within Google’s service ecosystem.

Codey supports 20+ coding languages, including Go, Google Standard SQL, Java, Javascript, Python, and Typescript. Developers will get access to Codey through an extension for Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, the Google Shell Editor, as well as in Google’s cloud-hosted Workstations service. Developers will be able to chat with this model right in a chat box in their IDE, like Android Studio Bot or write a comment in a text file and have it generate the relevant code.

Codey is specifically trained Codey to handle coding-related prompts, but Google also trained the model to handle queries related to Google Cloud in general.

For the time being, only a handful of selected testers will get to experience Codey firsthand. However, we’re likely to hear more about Google’s plans for Codey at the upcoming Google Cloud Next event.