On March 26, 2026, Google announced new switching tools in the Gemini app: users can bring their memories, preferences, and full chat history over from ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI assistants instead of starting from scratch. Two migration paths went live the same day on desktop — a copy-paste prompt for memories, and a ZIP upload for entire chat histories.
It is a small feature aimed at the most physical wall in the assistant wars: switching costs. As the capability gap between frontier models narrows, whoever lets new users arrive “with their memories intact” turns a rival’s accumulated personalization into a portable asset.
How Memory Import Works
The flow starts inside the Gemini app: Settings, then Apps & services, then Import. Google provides a suggested prompt; you paste it into your current AI app (ChatGPT, Claude, or another), copy that app’s response, and paste it back into Gemini, which converts it into usable memories. Preferences, standing instructions, and background context all travel through this pipe.
The clever part is that it requires zero cooperation from competitors: no API, no data-exchange agreement. “Tell me everything you remember about me” becomes the top layer of the migration protocol.
Uploading Chat History as a ZIP
Chat history takes the other road. Most AI services offer data export; once you have the ZIP file, you upload it through Gemini’s import flow and the system parses and converts the contents. Google emphasizes that saved chats — from Gemini and from other apps — become memories, and that users can browse and manage the imported results in My Library.
In other words, Google is not storing old conversations as a static archive. It is decomposing them and folding them into a memory layer that keeps influencing future responses.
“Past Chats” Becomes “Memory”
Alongside the import tools, Gemini’s “Past chats” section has been renamed “Memory.” That is more than a label change: it repositions conversation history from a filing cabinet into a cumulative, portable personal-context asset. The new features ship on desktop first with mobile to follow; the UK gets the Memories setting, memory import, and ZIP-based chat history transfer on April 29.
Switching Costs as a Competitive Weapon
MacRumors’ same-day coverage named the target directly: the feature is built to court existing ChatGPT and Claude users by removing the “re-teach your assistant” friction. For Google this is classic platform play — the ChooseGPT page it maintains already showcases Gemini, Veo 3, NotebookLM, Flow, and Whisk, and the switching tools slot neatly into that broader recruitment funnel.
There is a second-order effect worth flagging: assistant memories are a compounding asset users cannot easily see. Every correction, preference, and standing instruction an app absorbs makes its responses incrementally better fitted to one person. Export tools make that asset legible — and once users can inspect what an assistant has inferred about them, expectations about editing and deleting that profile will follow. Google already points users at My Library to manage imported memories, and treating memory as a browsable, portable object is a real shift from treating it as an opaque byproduct of usage.
Expect the rivals to copy it. Every assistant’s settings page will grow an “Import from…” menu, and data portability will decay from differentiator into table stakes — the same trajectory as phone-number portability and email contact export before it.
Lessons for Product Teams
Three design decisions worth noting. First, the prompt-as-protocol approach: absent an industry standard, “have the other app output its own memory” sidesteps platform lock-in and is the most pragmatic data-portability mechanism available today. Second, the merger of memory and history: imported conversations become memories, which signals Google treats long-term personal context as a single asset layer. Third, the ZIP upload keeps the narrative of user-initiated migration on the user’s side — no direct platform-to-platform data exchange, and a cleaner story about where privacy responsibility sits.
If your product accumulates user context — preferences, history, personalization — the question to ask now is simple: when users want to leave, do you hand them a ZIP file or a wall?
Sources
- Make the switch: Bring your AI memories and chat history to Gemini — Google Blog
- Google Launches Gemini Import Tool for Switching From ChatGPT, Claude, and Other AI Apps — MacRumors
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.