# Do AI assistants remember your other conversations?

> Only partly, and only when a memory feature is turned on. Each new chat with an AI assistant starts without the text of your earlier chats.

Canonical URL: https://vivu.ai/guide/do-you-remember-our-other-conversations

Only partly, and only when a memory feature is turned on. Each new chat with an AI assistant starts without the text of your earlier chats. Claude and ChatGPT both have optional features that carry some of it forward. One is saved memories: short notes about you and your preferences. The other is the ability to search or reference past chats, which depends on your plan and settings. Neither feature replays your whole history into a new conversation, and neither is a place to keep large files like video.

## What carries over and what doesn't

The model itself doesn't change from talking to you. What feels like memory is extra text that gets added at the start of a new conversation, or looked up during it.

Saved memories are the compact version: your job, the tone you like, a project you mention often. They're short summaries, so details drop out. The assistant may know you're making a video series and still not know which episode you were stuck on.

Past-chat search is closer to real recall. When it's switched on, the assistant can look up earlier conversations that seem relevant and read parts of them. It pulls in pieces when they seem useful. Your whole past or last conversation isn't sitting in view.

Projects are a third option. Instructions and files you put in a project are available to every chat inside it, which is often the most predictable way to keep context from one session to the next.

Temporary or incognito chats sit outside all of this. They aren't used to build memory and, depending on the app, may not stay in your history at all.

## Why it sometimes seems to forget

Memory is a summary and search is a lookup, so either one can miss. An assistant might recall the gist of a video you talked about and still have nothing on the specific moment you were trying to find. If a detail matters, restate it, or keep it somewhere the assistant can reliably reach.

## Footage is the hardest thing to carry over

Video shows the gap most clearly. A long recording doesn't fit into a chat as something an assistant can search, and memory stores notes, not footage. If you want to ask next week about a moment in your own videos, the footage has to live in a tool the assistant can call. [Whether an assistant can search video files at all](https://vivu.ai/guide/can-ai-assistants-search-my-video-files) comes down to exactly that.

With [Vivu](https://vivu.ai/mcp) added as a connector in Claude, ChatGPT or another assistant that supports MCP, the videos you upload to a Vivu project are indexed once, so a conversation you start days later can search the same project without re-sending anything. A question like "someone talks about nerves before a performance" comes back as time ranges from different videos in the project, each with a short reason, and you can ask a follow-up from any later chat against the same index. That continuity is what lets [planning new videos from your old ones](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-to-plan-content-from-past-videos-with-claude) carry on across sessions instead of starting over each time.

## When you don't need any of this

If each conversation is a self-contained task, like a rewrite or a quick question, memory adds little. And if you'd rather the assistant didn't carry anything over, turning memory off and using temporary chats is a reasonable default. The cost is retyping some context now and then.

## Which kind of remembering you need

If what you want carried over is about you (your preferences, ongoing projects, how you like answers formatted), memory features are built for that, and you can review and edit what they keep. If it's the content of your work, and footage in particular, don't count on chat memory. Put it somewhere the assistant can search when you ask, and then it stops mattering which conversation you're in.

## FAQ

### Do you remember our last conversation?

Not automatically. An AI assistant starts each chat fresh unless memory or past-chat search is turned on. With past-chat search enabled, you can ask it to look up the previous conversation, and it can read the relevant parts. Without it, paste a short summary of where you left off at the start of the new chat.

### Why does the assistant remember something I said in a different chat?

A memory feature is on. Saved memories are added to new conversations so the assistant can use them, and some apps also reference past chats automatically. You can usually see what's stored in settings, delete individual memories, or turn the feature off entirely.

### Does an AI assistant remember a video I showed it before?

Generally no. Even if you shared a clip, or described one, in an earlier chat, memory keeps a short note at most and never the footage itself. To ask about the same video later, share it again or keep it in a tool connected to the assistant that can search it.