Summary created by Smart Answers AI
In summary:
- PCWorld reports that Google’s Gemini may soon receive conversation branching functionality, a feature currently unique to ChatGPT among major AI chatbots.
- This capability allows users to explore different conversational paths from any point without losing the original thread, enhancing experimentation and control.
- Android Authority discovered hints of this upcoming feature in Gemini’s code, while competitors like Claude still lack branching functionality.
Ever wish you could take an existing AI conversation in an entirely new directory while keeping the original chat thread intact? ChatGPT makes it easy with its “branching” feature, but Claude and Gemini don’t offer any branching functionality–or at least, not yet.
While there’s still no word of conversation branching coming to the standard Claude chat interface, code spotted in the Gemini app hints that Google’s AI chatbot may soon get the feature.
Android Authority says it found “evidence” of “functional” chat branching in a recent build of the Gemini app, while noting that the feature “isn’t live yet” and “needs some tinkering to enable.”
So, what’s so special about chat branching? Put simply, it allows you to create a “branch” of an existing AI chat from any point in the conversation, handy for experimenting with different versions of a given chat without losing the original thread.
In ChatGPT, for example, you can branch the chat by navigating to any reply, clicking the three-dot “overflow” button (as pictured above), and selecting the “Branch in new chat” option.
When you do, you’ll spawn a new chat that starts at the specific branch point, allowing you to continue the conversation with new prompts while leaving the original chat as-is. You could also spawn a second branch from the first chat thread, or even create a branch of a branch.
Once you’ve branched a chat, you can do things like explore different options suggested by the AI (“tell me more about option B”) without unduly cluttering the chat context. You could also experiment how the AI reacts to slight differences in the wording or tone of your prompt.
Neither Claude nor Gemini have native branching features in their standard chat apps (Claude Code does let you “fork” a thread).
You could try branching a Claude or Gemini conversation by editing one of your replies or regenerating the model’s answers, but doing so wipes out the subsequent chat thread.