I used Gemini’s new AI memory importing feature, and now it knows as much about me as ChatGPT

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Switching AI chatbots is suddenly far less annoying

Gemini Memory Import
(Image credit: Google)

Switching between AI assistants has always had one deeply irritating flaw. No matter how polished the interface or how clever the answers, every new chatbot relationship begins with a bureaucratic ritual. You have to explain yourself all over again. Your preferences, your habits, your projects, your weirdly specific recurring requests, all of it has to be painstakingly reintroduced like you are onboarding a very enthusiastic intern with no notes.

Google clearly knows this is annoying, because Gemini has enhanced its memory features to make that process much less tedious. Gemini will help you bring over all the information another AI chatbot has accumulated about you in a couple of simple steps. That means it will import everything ChatGPT, Claude, or other platforms know about you and your preferences, so Gemini can feel more familiar with how you'd like it to behave. The company is pitching it as a smoother path for people who are curious about trying Gemini without losing the personalized feel they have already built up elsewhere.

Gemini Memory Import

(Image credit: Future)

I have used ChatGPT long enough that it has accumulated plenty of information about me, so I decided to see what Gemini could learn from it through the process. I clicked on the "Import memory to Gemini" button in the settings menu, and was offered the option of either uploading my conversations with an AI chatbot in a zip folder or using a provided prompt to gather the information.

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The prompt, which I would present to my AI of choice, asks it to "go through our past conversations and sum up what you know about me" and provide all that information in a clean list format with demographic details, preferences and interests, relations, events, and any rules I'd given it.

I gave ChatGPT the prompt, and it wrote out an almost worryingly thorough list that I then submitted to Gemini.

Gemini knows

Gemini did not suddenly become a clone of ChatGPT, but suddenly it knew a lot about me, from where I live to the kinds of hobbies I have, and even my coffee preferences. It gained the familiarity ChatGPT had accumulated over multiple years. It had more context about me and how I want it to behave, so I wouldn't need to constantly clarify my prompts.

That friction reduction is more important than it sounds. The promise of AI assistants has always been convenience, but convenience falls apart quickly when every platform makes you start over. A model that understands your patterns is often more useful than one that is technically stronger but has no idea how you think.

That creates a lock-in effect. The more a chatbot learns about your preferences, the harder it becomes to leave, even if another tool is better in some other way. Google’s import feature is a direct response to that problem.

Most people won't want to feel married to one AI service forever just because it happens to remember that they like concise answers or very strong coffee. The more portable that context becomes, the easier it is to move around and compare tools without sacrificing all the setup work that made one of them feel helpful in the first place.

AI companies are still racing on speed and capability, but continuity is important too. They do not just want to be the smartest assistant. They want to be the one who already knows how you'd like it to operate.

Google’s new import tools are an attempt to catch up on that front, and after trying them, I can say they make Gemini feel much less generic. It still has its own voice, but I don't have to tell it how to couch its answers or to accommodate my food preferences if I ask for recipe ideas.

Which is, in the world of AI assistants, a surprisingly meaningful upgrade.

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Eric Hal Schwartz
Eric Hal Schwartz
Contributor

Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.

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