Could Voice-Driven Coding be the Future? Salesforce says Yes.

If anyone was still questioning whether or not AI was here, this article should put those concerns to rest. As a prominent artificial intelligence app developer, we’ve explored in other articles how AI is making its way into a myriad of fields and is even positioned to revolutionize some industries in 2022. 

However, as we see the application of AI take form in various domains, it seems that Salesforce is betting on AI making a significant impact on voice-driven coding.

Salesforce started to explore the implementation of AI back in 2016 when it first launched its AI framework called Einstein. The intention of Einstein was to enhance a user experience that spanned the entire Salesforce stack. Here, Einstein gathers data on every user action and provides predictive analytics and natural language processing (NPL) and machine learning to enhance the user experience for Salesforce users. And as an iPhone developer based in San Francisco mobile app company, we couldn’t be happier to see our neighbor release some fascinating news regarding AI advancements. Let’s dig in.

Meet Salesforce Chief Professor Silvio Savarese 

Last year, Salesforce brought on former Stanford professor Silvio Savarese, to act as standing chief. Here, Salesforce aims to expand on its AI initiatives, make better use of massive Salesforce datasets and explore ways to enhance the user experience.

So, where does Dr. Silvio Savarese plan to take Salesforce regarding the development of its AI practices? For starters, he’s looking to build on his vast experience in voice-activated AI. “One of the major directions that I’m pushing here is really to bring AI to empower people in business in new ways, and I’m really excited to deliver that power with experiences that are so simple that anyone can use them,” Savarese explained. Building on this, he and his research team of over 100 data scientists and engineers, are developing a property Salesforce AI voice technology called CodeGen. The idea behind CodeGen is to allow people to describe a certain functionality and CodeGen builds the code behind the scenes the fulfill the user request. 

But it’s not simply telling the AI tech what you want; Savarese said it’s more of a conversation. “CodeGen really provides a new way of developing software. Rather than writing code directly, users would simply describe the problem they’re trying to solve in plain English in a conversation. So the conversation part is very, very important,” he explained.

To touch on this a Salesforce blog post explaining CodeGen:

In this post, Savarese goes on to elaborate how yes, this is early and experimental, but it shows incredible promise for new solutions in the AI voice space in the coming years.

Example of conversational coding from Salesforce using CodeGen tool. Image Credits: Salesforce

“The goal is to address a couple of users. One is more experienced developers, which in this case CodeGen will assist them with writing the code and take over those manual portions of the processing, those parts that aren’t that interesting from the coding perspective. The second user is those people with no coding experience, so almost zero expertise in coding, but CodeGen can still give them a way to build software to solve real problems,” 

What Does This Mean for the Future of Voice-Actived AI?

This news understandably made a huge splash in the world of AI development and honestly, it’s got a lot of organizations and development firms eyeing the technology and thinking of ways they could leverage this type of technology as it makes its way to more mainstream application and services.  

Our take is this technology is still in its infancy but like all things with AI, technology evolves extremely fast. So, don’t be surprised if more applications of voice-activated coding development crop up in competitive services or new product offerings within the market. 

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