Gemini’s Next Trick Makes ChatGPT’s Memory Look Basic

Rita El Khoury / Android Authority

The AI chatbot race is heating up, and Google is gearing up to give its Gemini assistant a significant boost in how well it understands you. In a post shared on X, Josh Woodward, VP of Google Labs and Gemini, revealed that Gemini will soon gain the ability to recall past conversations and, eventually, learn from your activity across other Google apps, such as Gmail, Calendar, and YouTube.

This comes just weeks after OpenAI announced a major upgrade to ChatGPT’s memory, allowing the assistant to remember past conversations and use that information to tailor future replies. With that update, OpenAI said ChatGPT can offer responses that feel more relevant to your interests, habits, and preferences, creating smoother and more helpful interactions.

Google’s plan appears to be twofold, with Gemini soon getting its own memory. “It starts by knowing your past chats (launching soon),” Woodward wrote. This should put it on similar footing with ChatGPT’s memory feature, enabling it to recall earlier conversations and learn from how you use it over time.

But the bigger reveal was something the team is calling “pcontext,” short for personalized context. While still in internal testing, this feature is designed to pull insights from your entire Google account, giving Gemini a deeper understanding of your life. “We’ll make it easy for you to bring in all of your Google context (Gmail, Photos, Calendar, Search, YouTube, etc.),” Woodward said.

The post also hinted that Gemini would become more proactive. What exactly that would look like remains unclear, but the possibilities are wide open. In theory, Gemini might eventually surface helpful suggestions by understanding your schedule, recent searches, or inbox activity.

Of course, this kind of deep integration naturally brings up privacy concerns. While Google already holds all this information from our lives across its services, letting an AI assistant access and synthesize it into one continuous profile may feel like a bigger leap. The company says it will require explicit permission before Gemini can access any of this data. However, users may still wonder how that information is used, stored, or potentially leveraged beyond their immediate interaction.

Still, the ambition is clear. Google wants Gemini to be more than just a chatbot. It wants it to anticipate your needs, act on your behalf, and become an extension of your digital life. Woodward called it a move toward making Gemini more “personal, proactive, and powerful,” and teased that more updates are coming soon.

All of this is likely just a taste of what’s coming at Google I/O 2025, which kicks off May 20.

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