New Chat, Clear Chat, or Delete: What Each One Keeps
There are three ways to make a conversation with your companion feel like a fresh start: the plus button at the top of the chat, the bin button beside it, and the delete button on each conversation in your history. They look like three strengths of the same thing. They are not, and the difference matters most for the question people have just before they press one: if I clear this, will my companion forget me? It will not. Here is what each control removes and what it leaves alone, read out of the code that runs when you press it.
Three Controls, Three Different Jobs
New Chat sets the conversation aside and deletes nothing
New Chat is the plus button at the top of the chat, and the New Chat button at the top of your conversation history. It does not touch the conversation you were in: that one stays in your history exactly as it was, every message intact. The chat window empties, usually with a greeting at the top, and your next message starts a new conversation. Until you send it there is nothing new to keep, because a greeting is shown to you rather than saved. It is the control the guide to what your companion calls you reaches for when a new name deserves a clean room.
Clear Chat empties the conversation and keeps its place
Clear Chat is the bin button right next to it. It asks “Clear all messages in this conversation?”, and that question leaves out the word that matters most, so here it is: Clear permanently deletes every message in the conversation, yours and your companion's, and there is no undo. The conversation itself stays in your history, empty, and you can open it and carry on inside it. On paid plans a long conversation also keeps a running summary for your companion, and Clear resets that along with the messages, so nothing of the old thread is carried forward inside it.
Delete removes the conversation, messages and all
Delete lives in your conversation history, where every conversation in the list has its own delete button. It asks “Delete this conversation?” before it acts. Say yes and the conversation leaves the list, taking all of its messages and its summary with it. This one is permanent too.
What Each One Keeps
Here is all of it in one place. Whatever belongs to a conversation can go with it. Whatever belongs to you or to your companion stays.
| New Chat | Clear Chat | Delete | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The conversation in your history | Kept, exactly as it was | Kept, now empty | Removed |
| Its messages | Kept | Permanently deleted | Permanently deleted |
| Its running summary (paid plans) | Kept | Deleted | Deleted |
| Photos you attached and images made in it | Kept | Deleted, unless something else still uses the same picture | Deleted, unless something else still uses the same picture |
| Your approved memories | Kept | Kept | Kept |
| Suggestions waiting for your approval | Kept | Kept | Kept |
| Instructions, dials and custom greeting | Kept | Kept | Kept |
| Saved Moments | Kept | Kept | Kept |
Pictures follow their messages. When Clear or Delete removes the last message showing a photo you attached, the photo is deleted as well, and an image made in that chat leaves the dashboard's Your Images tab with it. The exceptions are the ones you would want: a picture that another message still shows stays until that message goes too, and an image you have chosen as a companion's face is kept.
Why None of Them Makes Your Companion Forget You
Look at the bottom half of that table. Everything that survives all three controls survives for the same reason: none of it belongs to a conversation.
Memories and suggestions belong to you. A memory keeps a note of the message it came from, but nothing ties the memory to that message still existing, and neither Clear nor Delete goes anywhere near your memories or the suggestions waiting in your queue. Clearing the chat where you said you had started a new job does not remove the memory that you have a new job, and deleting a single message works the same way.
Instructions, dials and your custom greeting belong to the companion. They are stored on the companion itself, not on any conversation, and each new conversation picks them up from there. Whatever you do to one conversation, the next one meets the same companion you set up.
Saved Moments keep their own copy. A moment holds its own words and its own recording, so the conversation it came from can be cleared or deleted and the moment stays where it is, on the dashboard's Saved Moments tab.
Whether a memory reaches your companion depends on your plan, not on these buttons. On Starter or Unlimited, or during a day pass, approved memories are what your companion draws on from one conversation to the next, so a cleared chat changes nothing it knows about you. On the free plan, saved memories are not handed to a companion at all and no new ones are suggested; anything saved earlier stays on the Memories tab, where you can read it, edit it or delete it.
So clearing a chat is not how you make a companion forget something. The Memories tab is: delete a memory there and it is gone. The curating guide covers the approval queue and pinning in full.
The one piece of memory-like context that does belong to a conversation is its running summary, which is exactly why Clear and Delete take it. It belongs to that one conversation and does not follow you into another; how the summary works has its own article.
One thing Delete can change is how you are greeted. A companion's built-in greeting depends on whether you have any conversation with it at all, so if you delete the last one, its next greeting is the one it uses when you first meet. A custom greeting you wrote is used either way, and nothing your companion knows about you has moved.
Which One to Reach For
Match the control to what you want gone
A change of subject is New Chat. Nothing is lost, and the old thread waits in your history if you want to go back to it.
A thread you want gone is Clear Chat. The words go for good, and the conversation keeps its place so you can start over inside it.
A thread you want gone from the list as well is Delete.
Something your companion knows about you is none of the three. It lives on the Memories tab.
Before you clear or delete anything you might want later, take a copy. On your dashboard, Settings → Your Data → Download my data saves your conversations and their messages, your memories, your suggestions and your Saved Moments in one file, and everything it includes has its own guide. Pictures are the exception: the file carries a photo only as a link that stops working soon afterwards, so if a chat holds an image made there that you want to keep, download it from Your Images first. And one thing clearing is not: it gives nothing back to your daily message allowance.
Start Over the Way You Mean To
New Chat and Clear Chat sit at the top of the chat, Delete is on each conversation in your history, and what your companion knows about you is on the Memories tab.
Open Your Dashboard