Bard wants to get to know you better by committing your preferences to its ‘Memory’

Whether it’s dietary choices, travel preferences, or just day-to-day nuances, repeating yourself on basic facts to Bard or other artificial intelligence bots can get old fast. It makes them feel a lot like Google Assistant in its current, ridiculously stupid state. However, Google recognizes this with Bard, and is giving it a ‘Memory’ for things you tell it.

If you’ve used ChatGPT, you’re probably already familiar with its custom instructions feature, which does something similar. So, telling Bard your favorite color, that you are allergic to a certain food it should exclude while trying to make recipe recommendations, and more will now net you a more tailored experience.

This new level of personalization was first spotted by 9to5Google. The image you see above shows off how you can “Create a Memory”, like ‘I try to avoid eating meat’, ‘I have 2 kids’, or ‘Please give shorter responses’. Ideally, you’l be able to house many ‘Memories’ for Bard to reference while giving responses so that they’re unique to how you’d prefer it ‘think’.

If you want to delete memories, there’s a page for that too. This means you can add and remove them based on your privacy concerns or just not use the feature at all. Personally, I’m yanked back to the idea of the canceled or missing-in-action “Assistant Memory” feature we never got.

Now that we’re nearly certain Bard’s model will replace the heart and soul of Google Assistant in the near future, making it more powerful and capable (or just competent…), I’m convinced that Bard Memory will be the precursor to Assistant Memory, and that it’s perhaps a testing ground for the feature.