Gemini App for Android Gets a ChatGPT-Like Privacy Feature and Personalised Responses

Google is adding a couple of new features to its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Gemini. On Wednesday, the Mountain View-based tech giant announced personalised responses and Temporary Chats for Gemini's Android app. The first is a personalisation capability that allows the AI chatbot to fetch information from previous conversations to tailor the responses to the user's preferences. The latter is a privacy feature that allows users' conversations to remain private, as Google does not store the data on its servers or train its AI models on them.

Gemini Gets Two Important Features

In a blog post, the tech giant announced the two new features for the Gemini app. Interestingly, the company did not mention whether these updates are also being rolled out on the web interface. Among the two, the privacy feature Temporary Chats is something OpenAI's ChatGPT has been offering some quite some time now.

Temporary Chats in Gemini
Photo Credit: Google

It is now coming to Gemini as an option to let users have a conversation where the information is neither picked by Gemini itself (for personalised responses) nor by Google (to train its models). In essence, this is the best chat mode when users want to discuss something of a sensitive nature.

Temporary Chats are kept in the company's AI servers for up to 72 hours to respond to users and to process any feedback. After that, it is deleted. Notably, the feature is expected to roll out to all users over the coming weeks.

With personalised responses, Gemini can now reference past chats in conversations. A similar feature was rolled out by Anthropic earlier this week. Essentially, it can be understood as the extension to the Memory feature that allows the chatbot to remember certain details about the user.

With the new capability, Gemini can now automatically remember key details from past conversations, which do not necessarily have to be about the user. Then, when relevant, Gemini will include this information to make a response more relevant to the user. Alternatively, users can also ask the chatbot about any older conversation.

Personalised Responses in Gemini
Photo Credit: Google

Highlighting an example, the post stated, “You've previously discussed the evolution of characters' powers in your favorite comic book. Now, if you ask Gemini to “brainstorm a birthday party theme that's unique to me,” it might suggest a celebration based on your favorite character, complete with themed food and a custom photo booth with props.”

Notably, this feature will only work with the Gemini 2.5 Pro model. It is not available in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, or the UK. Google plans to expand this feature to the 2.5 Flash model and more countries in the coming weeks.

The tech giant says once the feature is available, it will remain on by default. However, users can turn it off by going to Settings in the Gemini app, selecting Personal context, and navigating to Your past chats with Gemini. Alternatively, users can also manage and delete their conversations via the Gemini Apps Activity.