Google Gemini’s Memory Feature Now Works on Free Accounts

Google’s Gemini AI chatbot might be one of the best ones you can use if you’re not willing to pay for a chatbot. Its free version is pretty good, and Google doesn’t put huge limits to it. Now, it’s getting one extra feature that was only available for Advanced users—Saved info.

Google is now rolling out its “Saved Info” feature to free users of Gemini Advanced. Saved Info, if you haven’t used it, acts as a memory bank for Gemini, allowing users to store crucial details about their lives, work, preferences, and communication styles. This eliminates the need to repeatedly provide the same context or instructions with every interaction. A lot of other AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, have already rolled out similar features, and Google itself has had this one for a while now if you were an Advanced user. Now, you’ll get access to it even if you don’t pay for the AI.

It’s pretty neat because it lets you give Gemini some info to keep in mind, so you don’t have to constantly remind it over and over of stuff while you’re writing your prompts. Imagine having to remind your AI assistant of your job title, dietary restrictions, or preferred writing style every time you interact. That was the status quo for chatbots for a long time, and it’s good to see that a lot of them keep implementing memory banks to remember facts about the user to take into account for outputs. By allowing users to proactively input and manage personal information, Gemini can tailor its responses to be more relevant and helpful.

Users can access and manage their “Saved Info” through a dedicated page in their Settings menu. Once you’re there, you can manage what Gemini knows, or doesn’t know, about you and your personal life. You can make it remember things such as what breed your dog is, or what’s your occupation, or what you usually eat—things that will eventually become handy in future interactions with the chatbot. The company also recently announced another recall feature that can find information and context from past chats. That recall feature, introduced earlier this month, remains exclusive to Gemini Advanced subscribers.

There are a few key differences between both features. “Saved Info” is proactive, allowing users to preemptively inform Gemini about their preferences. By contrast, this recall feature is reactive, enabling Gemini to retrieve information from previous interactions. Both contribute to a more personalized experience and help make Gemini better by overall getting better at remembering stuff you told it, but they operate on different principles and serve distinct purposes. “Saved Info” is about establishing a persistent knowledge base, while recalling is about contextual awareness within a specific conversational history. If anything, you can think of both features as complementing each other in a way. It’s not clear if that other feature will land for free users yet, though.

So far, this looks like a pretty cool upgrade for Gemini free users, and you now have one less reason to fork up those $20 a month for the Google One AI subscription. There are other reasons why it might still be worth it, such as deeper integration with other Google apps and access to more advanced models for deeper thinking (although the 2.0 Pro model is only available in an “Experimental” version right now and Google also retired the previous 1.5 Pro model, so there’s not really a stable Pro model at the time of writing).

Source: 9to5Google