As an AI chatbot positioned against ChatGPT, Google Bard was perceived by some as late to the party. However, Google first announced plans to become an “AI-first” company during I/O 2017 and has since gradually built on its infrastructure, eventually leading to the launch of Bard earlier this year, albeit in an experimental stage. Since then, however, we’ve seen Google taking big steps to incorporate Bard’s elements into some of its products, with the help of Extensions, for instance. Google is now making another key addition to Bard in the form of “Memory.”

This is Google’s way of saying Bard can now learn more about you for additional context on future requests. As 9to5Google notes, this is designed to eke out more personal responses based on the individual’s history, while Bard would previously start each session without much details on you, except for the information pulled through Extensions.

This is completely optional, and users can toggle it on or off depending on their preferences from the left-hand side of the screen, as illustrated below. Users will be greeted with a page prompting them to check out Memories, which Google details as — “Now, Bard can remember details across conversations, and use them to improve responses,” followed by the ability to add a memory, with some examples such as — I try to avoid eating meat, I have 2 kids, and Please give shorter responses.

So when you have one of these memories set up on Bard, it will ensure the responses reflect this. For the examples given above, one could potentially get recipes that don’t contain meat or make travel plans for the family, taking the number of children into account and giving more concise answers to queries. I can’t find the Memory tab on my Bard homepage, so it’s presumably rolling out gradually.

Of course, you can also set up one of your own memory, which will work in tandem with the information pulled up from Extensions such as Maps, YouTube, Docs, Gmail, and more, provided you have given the required consent. Based on the screenshots obtained by 9to5, Memories created by the user can also be deleted or replaced from the same page where they’re created.

As Google’s chatbot expands its feature set with new additions, it hasn’t been a completely smooth ride for the service so far. The company was recently scrutinized for indexing private Bard conversations on Google Search. It acknowledged this issue shortly after, saying this was not intended behavior and that it would block conversations from being indexed.

Privacy implications extend beyond just individual users, though, as Bard relies on millions of websites to gather information and rigorously train its AI models. Toward this end, Google now allows publishers to block Bard from accessing their content with its latest AI web crawler called Google-Extended.