Switching from one AI assistant to another has always had a deeply irritating flaw. No matter how good the interface or how intelligent the responses, every new relationship with a chatbot begins with a bureaucratic ritual. You need to explain yourself again. Your preferences, your habits, your projects, your strangely specific recurring requests, all of this must be carefully reintroduced, as if you were onboarding a very enthusiastic intern without notes.
Google clearly knows this is annoying, because Gemini has improved its memory features to make this process much less tedious. Gemini will help you retrieve all the information that another AI chatbot has accumulated about you in just a few simple steps. This 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 would like it to behave. The company is pitching it as a smoother route for curious people to try Gemini without losing the personalized feeling they’ve already developed elsewhere.
I’ve been using ChatGPT long enough to accumulate a lot of information about myself. So I decided to see what Gemini could get out of it through the process. I clicked the “Import Memory to Gemini” button in the settings menu and was offered to download my conversations with an AI chatbot into a zip folder or use a provided prompt to gather the information.
Article continues below
The prompt, which I would present to the AI of my choice, asks it to “review our past conversations and summarize what you know about me” and provide all of this information in a blank list format with demographic details, preferences and interests, relationships, events, and any rules I gave it.
I gave ChatGPT the prompt, and it wrote up an almost disturbingly comprehensive list that I then submitted to Gemini.
Gemini knows
Gemini didn’t suddenly become a ChatGPT clone, but suddenly it knew a lot about me, from where I live to the types of hobbies I have, and even my coffee preferences. It gained the familiarity that ChatGPT had accumulated over several years. There was more context about me and how I want him to behave, so I wouldn’t need to constantly clarify my prompts.
This reduction in friction is more important than it seems. The promise of AI assistants has always been convenience, but convenience quickly falls apart when each platform forces you to start over. A model that understands your patterns is often more useful than a model that is technically more sound but has no idea of your thinking.
This 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 another way. Google’s import feature is a direct answer to this problem.
Most people won’t want to feel married forever to a single AI service just because they remember 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 any of them feel useful in the first place.
AI companies are always fighting for speed and capabilities, but continuity is also important. They don’t just want to be the smartest assistants. They want to be the ones who already know how you would like it to work.
Google’s new import tools are trying to catch up on this front, and after trying them I can say they make Gemini a lot less generic. He still has his own voice, but I don’t need to tell him how to phrase his answers or accommodate my food preferences if I ask him for recipe ideas.
Which is, in the world of AI assistants, a surprisingly significant upgrade.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.
