Google releases its asynchronous Jules AI agent for coding - how to try it for free

The race to deploy AI agents is heating up. At its annual I/O developer conference yesterday, Google announced that Jules, its new AI coding assistant, is now available worldwide in public beta. The launch marks the company's latest effort to corner the burgeoning market for AI agents, widely regarded across Silicon Valley as essentially a more practical and profitable form of chatbot. Virtually every other major tech giant -- including Meta, OpenAI, and Amazon, just to name a few -- has launched its own agent product in recent months. Also: I tested ChatGPT's Deep Research against Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok AI to see which is best Originally unveiled by Google Labs in December, Jules is positioned as a reliable, automated coding assistant that can manage a broad suite of time-consuming tasks on behalf of human users. The model is "asynchronous," which, in programming-speak, means it can start and work on tasks without having to wait for any single one of them to finish.