Summary: On March 26, 2026, Google added switching tools that let users bring memories, preferences, and complete chat history from ChatGPT, Claude, or other assistants into Gemini. Desktop users can import memories through a copy-paste prompt or upload a chat-history ZIP file, and imported conversations become manageable memories. Google also renamed “Past chats” to “Memory.”
Google announced on March 26, 2026 that the Gemini app now ships switching tools: whatever you have built up in ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI assistant — memories, preferences, and your complete chat history — can now be carried across instead of rebuilt from nothing. Two routes opened on desktop the same day: a copy-paste prompt for memories, and a ZIP upload for whole chat histories.
The feature is modest in size, yet it attacks the most concrete barrier in the assistant wars: the cost of switching. With frontier models converging in capability, the player who lets newcomers show up with their history in tow converts a rival’s accumulated personalization into an asset that can simply be picked up and moved.
The Memory Import Flow, Step by Step
Everything starts inside the Gemini app: open Settings, head to Apps & services, and choose Import. Google hands you a ready-made prompt; you drop it into whichever AI app you are using today — ChatGPT, Claude, or anything else — take that app’s answer, and paste it back into Gemini, where it gets converted into memories you can actually use. Preferences, standing instructions, and background context all make the trip this way.
What makes the design sharp is that it asks nothing of the competition: no API and no data-exchange agreement appear anywhere in the chain. “Tell me everything you remember about me” simply becomes the top layer of the migration protocol.
Chat History Arrives as a ZIP Upload
Chat history travels the second road. Data export is already standard across most AI services; once you hold the ZIP file, you pick the chat-history import option in Gemini, upload it, and the system reads and converts what is inside. Google is explicit that chats saved in Gemini or in other apps turn into memories (saved chats become memories), and the imported results can be looked through and managed inside My Library.
Put differently, old conversations are not filed away as a frozen archive. Google breaks them apart and merges them into the memory layer that keeps shaping every future response.
From “Past Chats” to “Memory”
Naming changes came with the release: the “Past chats” section in Gemini is now called “Memory.” This reads as more than cosmetics — chat history is being reframed, away from a cabinet of old records and toward a personal-context asset that compounds over time and travels with its owner. Desktop gets the new features first and mobile follows; the UK, meanwhile, is scheduled for April 29, when the Memories setting, memory import, and ZIP-based chat history transfer go live there.
Weaponizing the Cost of Switching
MacRumors’ same-day coverage called the target as it saw it: the toolset is built for people already on ChatGPT and Claude, stripping away the friction of re-teaching an assistant from scratch. For Google, this is the platform playbook in familiar form — its ChooseGPT page already lines up Gemini, Veo 3, NotebookLM, Flow, and Whisk, and the new switching tools drop straight into that wider recruitment funnel.
A second-order effect deserves attention too. An assistant’s memory is a compounding asset its user can barely see: every correction, every preference, and every standing instruction quietly tunes responses toward one specific person. Export tooling makes that asset visible — and as soon as people can read what an assistant has inferred about them, expectations around editing and deleting that profile are sure to follow. Google is already steering users toward My Library to manage what gets imported, and treating memory as a browsable, portable object marks a real break from leaving it as an opaque byproduct of usage.
Assume the copycats. Sooner or later every assistant’s settings screen will grow an “Import from…” entry, and data portability will slide from differentiator into routine expectation — the same arc number portability and email contact export followed before it.
What Product Teams Should Take Away
Three design decisions stand out. First, using a prompt as the migration protocol: with no industry standard in place, asking the rival app to spell out its own memory slips past platform lock-in and remains the most pragmatic data-portability mechanism available. Second, fusing memory with history: conversations arriving through import are converted into memories, a sign that Google governs long-term personal context as one asset layer. Third, the ZIP upload keeps the story of a user-driven move on the user’s side of the table — no platform-to-platform exchange takes place, and accountability for privacy stays comparatively easy to pin down.
If your own product accumulates context about its users — preferences, history, personalization — one question deserves an answer now: when someone decides to leave, do you hand over a ZIP file, or a wall?