Stack Overflow from the keynote stage of WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin, showcased early previews of six new capabilities and features of its new OverflowAI offerings. Powering solutions from within both the public platform and its market-leading SaaS product, Stack Overflow for Teams, these AI/ML solutions will offer users a series of new capabilities that will ensure they get to solutions faster within their workflow.
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“For the last fifteen years, developers have come to Stack Overflow to get a solution to a specific problem. With the rise of Generative AI, Stack Overflow’s foundation of trusted and accurate data will be central to how technology solutions are built”
For several months, Stack Overflow has been outlining its vision for community and AI coming together as the inevitable next phase of growth in GenAI’s trajectory. Today that vision comes closer to reality as the developer community was given previews of how they will directly play a crucial role in how AI accelerates and evolves. There is no shortage of how developers can leverage AI, however, there is one core deterrent in its adoption – trust in the accuracy of AI-generated content. Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey of 90,000 coders recently found that 77% of developers are favorable of AI tools, but only 42% trust the accuracy of those tools.
Although there are currently more than a dozen new features, functions and capabilities in various stages of development across both Stack Overflow for Teams and the public platform, shared on the keynote stage was what users can request access to today, with limited Alphas beginning in late August 2023.
Within Stack Overflow for Teams, the company’s SaaS platform for developers and technologists:
- OverflowAI Enterprise Knowledge Ingestion: With OverflowAI, Stack Overflow for Teams users will be able to curate and build a knowledge base in minutes by leveraging existing, accurate and trusted content. AI/ML will create the first drafts of a tagging structure and recommend questions and answers, freeing up developers to focus on adding value by curating and refining the content to validate accuracy.
- OverflowAI Enhanced Search: Stack Overflow for Teams customers will be able to quickly find the most relevant answers and proactive learning paths, leveraging trustworthy sources such as Stack Overflow for Teams, Stack Overflow’s public platform, and other places a customer stores knowledge such as Confluence and GitHub, with more sources to be added over time.
- OverflowAI Visual Studio Code Extension: Developers spend a majority of their time in an IDE and Stack Overflow is not going to break that workflow. Stack Overflow for Visual Studio Code extension will pull in validated content from both the public platform and a user’s private Stack Overflow for Teams instance to provide developers with a personalized summary of how to solve problems efficiently and effectively.
- OverflowAI Slack Integration: Stack Overflow’s new StackPlusOne chatbot gathers generated solutions to the most technical challenges instantly – while you are in Slack. This new GenAI integration will provide answers to questions using all Stack Overflow community-validated sources, all while keeping a company’s data private.
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On Stack Overflow’s public platform:
- OverflowAI Search: Public platform users will be able to receive instant, trustworthy, and accurate solutions to problems using search and question asking powered by GenAI. Our goal is that responses generated can be attributed and cited, using the highly trusted knowledge from the more than 58 million questions and answers on Stack Overflow, with the ability to query the knowledge base further for more personalized and relevant results and follow up questions.
- AI Community Discussions: Developers now have new dedicated resources for unbiased, technical resources and responses from experts. A dedicated GenAI Stack Exchange will serve as a place for a community that is centered around knowledge sharing for writing prompts for GenAI tools and AI/ML more broadly. Additionally, Stack Overflow’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) Collective will include a new feature called Discussions that will provide a focused space to debate technical approaches, explore implementation strategies and share different perspectives, so that users can make more informed technical decisions.
“For the last fifteen years, developers have come to Stack Overflow to get a solution to a specific problem. With the rise of Generative AI, Stack Overflow’s foundation of trusted and accurate data will be central to how technology solutions are built,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, Chief Executive Officer at Stack Overflow. “There is no doubt that with widespread access to GenAI tools that code will be created more quickly, and the volume is likely to explode with code completion tools and the need for trust in their output will only increase for developers. Our goal with OverflowAI is to ensure developers are not only contributing to the foundation of what GenAI is today, they are also an integral part of building its future. Developers and technologists should take pride and ownership in knowing that community is the future of AI.”
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