What Gemini remembers, and the accounts where it does not

Gemini can learn from your past chats to personalise later ones. The interesting part is the set of conditions attached, because they decide whether you can build a working habit on it at all.

Three conditions, and one of them is an account type

Google lists what you need for memory of past chats:

• You must be 18 or over.
• You must be signed in with a personal Google Account. The feature "isn't available when you sign in to a work, school, or supervised Google Account".
• Keep Activity must be on. With that setting off, the feature is unavailable.

The control sits under Settings & help → Personal context → Memory.

That second condition is the one to absorb. If your working account is a Workspace account, this feature does not exist for you, and a workflow that assumes Gemini will recall last week's decision will quietly fail. It is not a setting your administrator can hand you.

Memory and retention are the same switch

The third condition couples two things that are separate at other providers. Keep Activity governs whether your chats are stored as activity and whether they train Google's models, and it also gates memory.

So the privacy-minded move described on the retention page, switching Keep Activity off, also removes personalisation. You are choosing between the two rather than tuning them independently. Worth knowing before you decide that one of them is the obvious setting.

Where it does not reach

Memory of past chats is currently limited to the Gemini mobile app, the web app at gemini.google.com, Gemini in Chrome where available, and Gemini on a smartwatch.

It is also not available inside Gems or Live chats. If you have built a Gem for a recurring engineering review, it does not accumulate knowledge of your codebase between runs; whatever it needs has to be in its instructions or its attached knowledge. In a text chat you can ask Gemini to reference a past Live conversation.

Finding and removing what it holds

Past chats live in Gemini Apps Activity, and that is where you delete them. Google notes there "might be a short delay before Gemini stops using it to personalize your responses", so an immediate re-test can mislead you.

Try this

Ask Gemini what it knows about your current project. Then check whether Memory is even on under Personal context, and which account you are signed into. On a work account the answer to the first question comes only from the conversation in front of you.

What goes wrong

Building a habit on recall that your work account does not have. Check the account type before designing around it.

Expecting a Gem to remember previous runs. Gems are outside this feature.

Turning Keep Activity off and still expecting personalisation. One setting governs both.

Deleting a chat and testing immediately. Google states there is a delay before it stops influencing responses.

Assuming a settings page shows everything. Asking in the chat is the check Google itself recommends.

How to check it worked

Delete the chat that contained the thing you want forgotten, wait rather than retesting straight away, then ask Gemini whether it used information from past chats. If you are on a Workspace account and personalisation appears to be happening, it is coming from something in the current conversation or an attached source, not from memory, and that distinction changes where you go looking.