Google makes it easier to bring your AI chatbot baggage over to Gemini

Google has made a very direct play for anyone who has spent the past two years training ChatGPT or Claude to understand their life, habits, and increasingly specific preferences. The company has introduced new “switching tools” for Gemini that let users import personal memory data and even old chatbot conversations from rival services. In simple terms, Gemini now wants your AI baggage, and it is offering to help carry it.

Announced on Thursday, the new tools are designed to lower one of the more annoying barriers to switching assistants: having to start from scratch.

If you have already spent months telling one chatbot your job, your routines, your favourite writing style, your family members’ names, or the fact that you absolutely do not want em dashes in your drafts, Google would prefer you not have to do all of that again.

Gemini doesn’t want you to start over

The first part of this feature focuses on “memories”, which is Google’s term for the personal details an AI assistant stores to make future replies feel more tailored. Gemini now offers suggested prompts that users can paste into another chatbot to generate a summary of those details, then copy back into Gemini.

Google says this can include things like interests, relationships, preferences and personal context. Essentially, if another assistant already knows you, Gemini would like a copy of the notes.

The second part is broader. Users can also upload exported chat histories in a ZIP file, which should make it possible to bring over older conversations from other platforms, including services like ChatGPT and Claude.

Google says Gemini will let users search through those imported chats and continue from where they left off, rather than treating every new assistant like a blank slate.

That is arguably the more useful part. A chatbot remembering your sibling’s name is one thing. Being able to pull context from months of past conversations, unfinished plans, or old brainstorming sessions is a much more practical way to make an AI tool feel less disposable.

This is less about convenience and more about competition

Underneath the friendly “switching” language, this is really a retention and acquisition play. AI assistants are no longer just one-off tools people dip into for recipe ideas or awkward email rewrites. The more people use them, the more context they accumulate, and that context has become a kind of lock-in.

Google clearly understands that. If users feel their chatbot has become a second brain, then the easiest way to win them over is to let them bring that brain with them.

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This comes at a time when OpenAI still dominates the mainstream conversation, and Anthropic has carved out its own loyal following. But Google has the advantage of being everywhere already. Gemini sits across Android, Google apps, and Chrome.

Whether people actually want to hand one tech giant the personal context they previously gave another is, of course, a separate question. But as product moves go, this is a smart one. Nobody enjoys setting up a new digital life from scratch, and Google is betting that AI won’t be any different.