To expand the reach of the company’s artificial intelligence software development assistant, Amazon Q Developer, Amazon Web Service Inc. said today it’s introducing support for multiple written languages.
Although English is one of the most common languages to code with, not all developers are English speakers. Gaining the ability to have a development assistant that is integrated directly into coding tools speak the same language as a software engineer makes that tool even more powerful for collaboration.
Amazon Q Developer is a generative AI-powered assistant that helps software engineers generate, troubleshoot and document code. It can work inline while developers are coding in their favorite applications and it can also work alongside them like a helper that can describe how unknown code works and provide documentation for application programming interfaces, libraries and connectors.
The tool now supports major languages such as Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, German, French and others in addition to English to enable diverse multilingual teams.
Srini Iragavarapu, director of generative AI applications and developer experiences, told News in an interview that this will help make development more inclusive, especially with so many teams being diverse and globally distributed.
“Although I personally have learned everything in English, I have a lot of friends who speak other languages,” Iragavarapu said. “In fact, just last week I was in Germany and in the Netherlands to meet the team there. While they talk in a group they talk in English, but when they break into small cohorts they do speak in their native language.”
According to Amazon, Q Developer’s new multilingual capability can give complete responses in multiple languages and maintain its technical accuracy. Putting code and documentation in the native language of the developer, eliminates the mental overhead of constantly translating, Amazon said.
Expanded language support is now available for integrated development environments, which are applications that help programmers develop, debug, compile and deploy code. It’s also available for command line interfaces with support for the AWS Management Console coming soon.
When using an editor, developers will be able to use inline chat to ask Q Developer to add comments to the code in their native language. Q Developer will also suggest follow-up questions in the user’s chosen language in chat, allowing them a more intuitive experience when describing code refactoring or asking what a piece of code does.
That will also be useful for users who need to understand comments or code written in other languages, for example. A developer could pick up code with comments not written in a language not native to their own and ask Q to explain how the code works and it will explain it in their own language. Iragavarapu said this will break down language barriers, making coding a truly global experience.
“This is one of those areas that we’ve gotten a lot of feedback, especially because of the diversity of the personas that we have in the developer ecosystem,” said Iragavarapu. “There are other areas too that we are constantly evolving and working on, but being able to talk to developer agents and the generative AI assistant here in this case in non-English is one of the most requested features.”
The larger number of supported languages are available in both the free tier and pro tier of Amazon Q Developer.
Images: News/Microsoft Designer, Amazon Web Services
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