Salesforce plans to launch voice-based coding tool

With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in almost every business, the interfaces that we use to communicate with computers and machines are also changing. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) major Salesforce is introducing the power of voice to customer experiences by allowing AI to have a direct impact on its customers through its voice-guided coding tool.

Former Stanford professor Silvio Savarese and his 100-people research team at Salesforce have been pursuing a voice-driven programming approach the company has dubbed CodeGen. The fundamental idea is to let people simply describe in plain-spoken English what they want to do, and the AI tech will produce the code based on the natural language instructions.

It is, however, not just telling the AI tech what you want. It is a conversation. “Without writing code directly, users simply describe the problem in plain English in a conversation. The conversation is important,” Savarese stressed. What Savarese means is that one might ask for something and the AI tech will ask for clarification (so on back and forth). This is however at an experimental stage.

CodeGen is being developed for two distinct sets of users –experienced coders and non-coders (those who can’t code). While CodeGen assists the former with coding and takes over manual processing (mundane parts); the latter will be given away to build software to solve real problems. The professor calls this ‘deep learning at scale.

“This is a foundational model, so CodeGen is built on a massive auto-regressive model with 16 billion parameters, which are trained with a very large amount of data,” Savarese added.

Salesforce’s AI endeavor began in 2019 when it launched a voice assistant nicknamed Einstein for its Salesforce 360 platform. Einstein provided voice-enabled support across the Salesforce stack. Einstein guides every action, insight, and prediction on Salesforce 360. It enables developers and administrators to build custom voice-powered apps for employees across each role and business, with just a few clicks.