Windows Terminal opens up its Terminal Chat AI experiments to open-source community

Microsoft is now opening up its Windows Terminal AI experiments to the open-source community. The best part of it? Developers will soon be able to try out this new feature free of charge and help to improve it. 

Terminal Chat is a feature — now rolling out in Windows Terminal Canary — that allows users to chat with an AI service to get help with tasks such as looking up commands or explaining errors. The AI service does not ship with its own large-language model, so users will need to provide their own. 

“This feature does not ship with its own large-language model. For now, users will need to provide their Azure OpenAI Service endpoint and key to use Terminal Chat,” Microsoft’s dev Christopher Nguyen says in the announcement.

The Redmond-based tech giant announced during the Build 2023 event back in May that Windows Terminal users would soon be able to leverage natural language AI to receive intelligent suggestions, error explanations, and even perform actions within the terminal.

For now, Terminal Chat only supports Azure OpenAI Service. You’ll need to add an AI service endpoint and key to the AI Settings of Terminal. The code for Terminal Chat can be found in the feature/llm branch of the Windows Terminal repository on GitHub.