Google is making a core Gemini feature available to free users

As fascinating as texting with a chatbot may be, there are various small details that make the experience feel artificial. Beyond the excessive use of em dashes and formulaic phrasing, AI is notorious for being weirdly forgetful, especially for free users. Google’s latest update may fix that forgetfulness for non-paying users, at least partially.

Gemini’s Past Chats feature is coming for free users

Google has started rolling out the Past Chats feature to non-paying users of Gemini. The feature will become available for users of the mobile app and web version of the chatbot, according to a 9to5Google report.

As its name suggests, Past Chats allows Gemini to take note of your previous conversations when it works on future responses. That allows the model to learn about your preferences and give you more personalized answers without the need to explicitly remind it of facts from your previous conversations.

For example, when you continue researching a topic in a new chat, you won’t need to clarify how far you went into it. You can also add, “Did you use any info from past chats?” to your Gemini prompts.

Some limitations

While the feature was first introduced to Google AI subscribers late last year, it’s just coming to everyone in most of the world. The exception is users in Europe, who are going to get access to the feature at a later time. That’s likely due to the more strict regulations about using personal user data in the European Union.

To activate the feature, you should go to the Gemini settings menu and find the new “Personal context” page. In it, you can enable or disable the “Your past chats with Gemini” toggle. That would make an “Instructions for Gemini” menu appear below the toggle, which appears to give you control over the details that Gemini remembers about you.



The future of that feature is to be able to tap into other Google products, such as Gmail and Photos, and get context from those. Other chatbots also offer similar features to their users. ChatGPT has a Memory feature that could tap into custom memories and the user’s recent chats.

Another step to usefulness

One of the positives of the quick development of AI is that some advanced features are quickly trickling down to free users. Having your digital assistant actually remember some key facts about you is the bare minimum many users would expect. I’m glad that Google is now providing this for free, and I hope it soon gets even smarter.

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