Temporary chat in Google Gemini is now widely available

Google Gemini has emerged as one of the top AI apps in the marketplace thanks to its extensive list of features. While the Gemini app comes built in with safety and privacy tools, there’s no easy way to disallow the chatbot from saving your past conversations. By contrast, ChatGPT’s Temporary Chat feature already offers this functionality.

Gemini finally caught up by announcing a similar feature of its own this month, also named Temporary chat, that lets users discuss ideas with the chatbot without worrying about finding those conversations in the Recent Chats list. This feature is now rolling out to all Google Gemini app users (Android and iOS), as well as Gemini on the web (via 9to5Google).

Accessing Temporary chat in Gemini takes a single tap of the dashed-out chat icon, positioned to the right of the New chat icon/button at the top of the Gemini side panel. There’s no conventional Gemini greeting here, with the onscreen text detailing what Temporary chat can do.

Communicate privately with Google Gemini

Some of the regular Gemini tools are also available in Temporary chat, including image creation with Imagen, which gets a banana emoji to mark the recent arrival of Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, a.k.a nano-banana. You don’t need a Google AI Pro or Ultra plan to use any of these features (including image generation), though having a subscription unlocks a few other perks.

Gemini says conversations in Temporary chat won’t be used to train its models or for personalization purposes, nor will they appear under the Recent Chats list or Gemini Apps Activity. However, temporary chats are saved for 72 hours “to help respond to you and keep Gemini safe,” according to the description.

By design, there’s no way to access your previous temporary chats, even if they’re within 72 hours of your conversation. On the flipside, accidentally swiping back on the temporary chat means you have to start over.

Still, this is a relatively minor inconvenience given that you previously had to sign out of Gemini to ensure the chats weren’t saved. Temporary chat is akin to incognito or secret mode on web browsers, typically used for a random (or embarrassing) query that we don’t want to appear in our history.

As 9to5Google notes, the Temporary chat option is available to users with personal Google accounts, while school or work-based accounts don’t have access at the moment.