Google Gemini Can Now Remember Your Previous Chats

The Google Gemini apps are getting a memory upgrade, with the AI bot now able to recall past conversations you've had with it—building on the tool's existing ability to remember personal details about you, such as the foods you like or what you do professionally.

Like several other new Gemini features when they first launched, this is exclusively for Google One AI Premium subscribers ($20 per month), with English language users getting the upgrade first. Google says support for more languages and Enterprise accounts will be added in the "coming weeks."

Google's intention here is to make Gemini more useful. You could refer back to something you were chatting about last week or last month, for example, or get the AI chatbot to summarize everything you've ever discussed about movies.

"Whether you're asking a question about something you've already discussed, or asking Gemini to summarize a previous conversation, Gemini now uses information from relevant chats to craft a response," writes Google's Dave Citron.

While this may set a few privacy alarm bells ringing, nothing has changed in terms of the controls users have over their Gemini data: Past conversations can be wiped from the record after a certain time period, or never stored in the first place. If you don't do this, your chats may be used to further train Google's AI models.

You may remember OpenAI added conversation search to ChatGPT back in November, so Gemini isn't the only AI tool like this experimenting with persistent memory. As yet, it's not something I've seen in other chatbots such as Copilot or Perplexity.

How to get the new memory upgrade

Referring to a previous chat in Gemini. Credit: Lifehacker

Log into Gemini using a premium account with your language set to English, and you should get the new update automatically.

You can ask about previous chats using the same natural language that works with any other Gemini conversation. Anything like "what were we talking about yesterday?" or "summarize today's chats so far" will work. In my testing, it's mostly pretty accurate, with links back to earlier chats, though there were one or two glitches.

I asked Gemini for film recommendations and the chatbot remembered that I'd said I liked David Lynch movies in a previous chat—a good example of the memory feature working well. As I generally delete AI chats, I couldn't dig back further into records from previous days or weeks, which might be more of a test.

The privacy controls here haven't changed. Click Activity in the left-hand panel (on the web), or tap your account picture then Gemini Apps Activity (on mobile): The next screen lets you delete specific conversations, or your entire Gemini chat history. You can also stop any chats being saved in the future, or have them auto-delete after a set time.

There's also the option to delete individual chats from inside the Gemini interface. On the web, click the three dots next to the conversation in the left-hand panel, then choose Delete. On mobile, long-press on any previous conversation, and tap Delete. Erasing a chat is like erasing Gemini's memory, and you won't be able to refer back to it again.

You shouldn't be entering anything too personal or sensitive into a Gemini conversation, however: Chats are sometimes reviewed by humans for quality control purposes. "Please don't enter confidential information in your conversations or any data you wouldn't want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine-learning technologies," explains the Gemini privacy policy.

View the full article