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Tabnine Unveils AI Assistant for Visual Studio 2022, Chat Beta
Tabnine, known for its AI assistant Visual Studio Code extension, this month introduced a beta tool for the full-fledged Visual Studio 2022 IDE along with a new chat application, also in beta.
"Tabnine for Visual Studio 2022 is now available in beta!" the company announced earlier this month. "Visual Studio 2022 users who work with C++, C#, or any other language can now use Tabnine's AI assistant. Additionally, Tabnine Chat support is coming soon, enabling users to interact naturally and in a flexible free-form manner with Tabnine AI models directly within the IDE."
The new Visual Studio 2022 tool, Tabnine AI Assistant - Visual Studio Autocomplete, has been installed more than 33,000 times as of this writing, a user count far dwarfed by the company's VS Code tool called Tabnine AI Autocomplete for Javascript, Python, Typescript, PHP, Go, Java, Ruby & more, which has been installed more than 6 million times.
[Click on image for larger view.] Tabnine Visual Studio 2022 Tool (source: Tabnine).
The beta Visual Studio 2022 tool reportedly provides AI code completion for C++ / C#, ASP.NET, Visual Basic, .NET, JavaScript, Java and all other languages. The company also offers AI completion tooling for other IDEs and code editors.
Tabnine offers various pricing plans and notes that the Visual Studio 2022 tool can be installed by following its Let's set up Tabnine for Visual Studio 2022 (Beta) guidance.
Tabnine Chat, meanwhile, is accessible only via a waitlist, with the company touting functionality that it says goes beyond the famous ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI.
[Click on image for larger view.] Tabnine in Visual Studio 2022 (source: Tabnine).
"While ChatGPT and other tools are useful for generating 'first draft' code, Tabnine Chat aims to support the workflows of professional developers working on big projects, especially in enterprises," the company said.
Enterprise benefits include: understanding and explaining current code; knowledge proliferation and accessibility; quality assurance and code consistency; continuous improvement and innovation; and standardization of coding practices.
The company said attributes of the Chat tool that help with all of that include:
- Tabnine Chat runs inside the IDE and is contextualized on whatever code you're working on. This makes it useful not just for creating an app from scratch but also for incremental and highly contextual work, which is typically the nature of development in larger commercial projects.
- Tabnine Enterprise customers can connect their repositories to Tabnine Chat, allowing it to assist with coding and answer questions based on internal projects. This is especially useful when the organization has a substantial set of internal APIs, libraries, services, and best practices that are being used.
- Tabnine Chat is compatible with strict security and compliance requirements that many organizations have. Tabnine Enterprise also allows isolated environment deployment using Virtual Private Cloud or on-premises deployment, ensuring total code privacy and security. In addition, Tabnine Chat was only trained on open-source code with permissive licenses, guaranteeing that our models aren't trained on GPL or other copyleft code.
"Imagine a private and secure AI assistant that has studied your entire codebase, all permissible open-source code, and every Stack Overflow Q&A, and is always available to answer any of your questions, generate and document code, right in your IDE," the Tabnine site's chat section says. "That's Tabnine Chat."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.