Google takes Dreambeans to India in bid to bring AI-generated personal stories to the masses

Google has launched its experimental AI app Dreambeans in India, its first market outside the U.S., as the company looks to tap the world’s second-largest internet market to bring personalized visual stories drawn from users’ digital activity to a broader audience.

On Monday, Google expanded Dreambeans, available on Android and iOS, to India with support for 13 local languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali, alongside English. The launch comes less than two months after Google made the app available to all eligible U.S. users aged 18 and older.

Introduced in June, Google’s Dreambeans uses information from connected Google services, including Calendar, Gemini, Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube, to proactively generate personalized, illustrated stories about users’ interests and everyday lives, without requiring them to enter a prompt. The app initially featured static, AI-generated illustrations, but Google recently added a feature that uses its Veo video-generation model to even animate images in select stories.

Google said it chose India as Dreambeans’ first international market because of strong interest from Indian users seeking access to the app and the widespread use of its services in the country. India stood out for its high overlap of users across Gemini, Gmail, and Google Photos, Google product manager Gozde Oznur said during a press briefing.

Dreambeans has recorded nearly 55,000 downloads in the U.S. since its June debut, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch. About 63% of those downloads came in September, when Google opened the app to all eligible U.S. users aged 18 and older. However, downloads dropped 84% month over month to about 5,500 in October.

In the first 30 days after Google opened Dreambeans to all eligible U.S. users, the app recorded an estimated 29,000 downloads, compared with 7.4 million for Meta’s Muse, 2.8 million for ChatGPT, 362,000 for Grok Bot, and 155,000 for Claude during their respective first 30 days after launch, Sensor Tower estimates show. However, unlike those general-purpose AI apps, Dreambeans focuses on generating personalized stories instead of responding to a broad range of user queries.

Even though Dreambeans supports many widely spoken Indian languages, users can select only one language at a time for their generated stories. The app can draw on information across Google services in multiple languages, but it cannot currently generate stories that mix languages, Oznur said during the briefing.

That could limit Dreambeans’ appeal in India, where many people regularly switch between languages, including Hindi and English, often mixing the two in what is commonly known as Hinglish.

Users can choose which Google services to connect to Dreambeans and disconnect them at any time, Oznur said. They can also delete their Dreambeans data from within the app. Moreover, Oznur asserted that information deleted from the underlying connected services is also removed from Dreambeans’ personalization system.

Users, Oznur said, can tell Dreambeans to avoid certain subjects, including business-related information, and the app will try to adjust its stories accordingly. She added that Dreambeans is available only to personal Gmail account holders, not enterprise users, and that generated stories are visible only to the account holder.

Dreambeans’ proactive approach also carries the risk of surfacing memories that users may find upsetting. Oznur acknowledged that Dreambeans could generate stories involving people who have died, for instance. She said users can tell the app to stop showing certain subjects, comparing the feature to controls in Google Photos that let users limit which memories appear.

Oznur told reporters that Google is exploring ways to make Dreambeans more actionable, moving beyond personalized stories and recommendations to help users act on the app’s suggestions.