When it comes to AI chatbots, there's currently a war on for consumer attention. All the big chatbot providers are looking to increase their user count and, in a minor coup for itself, Google just made it significantly easier for users of those other chatbots to defect to Gemini.
On Thursday, the company announced what it calls “switching tools,” new widgets that allow users to transfer “memories” (basically chunks of personal information) and even entire chat histories from other chatbots directly into Gemini. Users can easily share “key preferences, relationships, and personal context” in this way.
The idea is to make it significantly easier to adopt Google’s AI assistant, as users won’t have to spend large amounts of time re-training Gemini on who they are and what they want. The memory feature works like this: Gemini will suggest a prompt that the user can enter into their current chatbot, which will then generate a response that can be copied and pasted back into Gemini.
In this fashion, Gemini coaches the user on what kinds of information it would be helpful to know about them, while also helping facilitate the transmission of that information back into its own archive. “Once you import these memories, Gemini will understand the same key facts you’ve shared with other apps, like your interests, your sibling’s name, or where you grew up,” the company says.
When it comes to importing chat histories, Google says that all you need is to upload them in a zip file. It’s relatively easy to export chat logs via zips from most chatbots—including from ChatGPT and Claude. This allows users to “seamlessly pick up right where you left off,” the company says.







