Google has launched its experimental AI app Dreambeans in India, its first market outside the US, as it aims to tap into the world’s second-largest internet market and offer personalized visual stories drawn from users’ digital activities to a wider audience.
Google on Monday expanded Dreambeans, available on Android and iOS, to India with support for 13 local languages in addition to English, including Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali. The release comes less than two months after Google made the app available to all eligible U.S. users 18 and older.
Introduced in June, Google’s Dreambeans uses information from connected Google services like Calendar, Gemini, Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube to proactively generate personalized, illustrated stories about your interests and daily life without prompting. The app initially featured static illustrations generated by AI, but Google recently added the ability to animate images in selected stories using the Veo video generation model.
Google said it chose India as the first international market for Dream Beans due to strong interest from Indian users to access the app and expand the service in the country. Google Product Manager Ghozde Oznur told a press conference that India stood out for its high overlap in Gemini, Gmail, and Google Photos users.
Dreambeans has racked up about 55,000 downloads in the U.S. since its debut in June, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch. About 63% of those downloads took place in September, when Google opened the app to all eligible U.S. users 18 and older. However, the number of downloads in October decreased by 84% from the previous month to approximately 5,500.
Sensor Tower estimates that in the first 30 days after Google rolled out Dreambeans to all eligible U.S. users, the app had an estimated 29,000 downloads. Meanwhile, in the first 30 days after release, Meta’s Muse had 7.4 million downloads, ChatGPT had 2.8 million downloads, Grok Bot had 362,000 downloads, and Claude had 155,000 downloads. However, unlike these general-purpose AI apps, Dreambeans focuses on generating personalized stories rather than responding to broad user queries.
Although Dreambeans supports many widely spoken Indian languages, users can only select one language at a time for their generated stories. The app can tap into information across Google services in multiple languages, but it cannot currently generate mixed-language stories, Ozner said at the briefing.
This may limit the appeal of Dream Beans in India. That’s because in India, many people frequently switch between languages, including Hindi and English, often mixing the two in a language commonly known as Hinglish.
Dreambeans’ reliance on information from users’ Google accounts also raises questions about privacy and data access. The app uses Google’s personal intelligence technology to leverage connected services and personalize AI-generated stories. These services may contain sensitive personal information that some users may not want to share with AI apps just to receive personalized content.
Ozner said users can choose which Google services are connected to Dreambeans and can disconnect them at any time. You can also delete your Dreambeans data from within the app. Additionally, Ozner claimed that information removed from the underlying connectivity service is also removed from Dreambeans’ personalization system.
Ozner said users can tell Dreambeans to avoid certain topics, such as business-related information, and the app will try to adjust its stories accordingly. She added that Dreambeans is only available to personal Gmail account holders, not corporate users, and that stories generated can only be viewed by account holders.
Dreambeans’ proactive approach also carries the risk of surfacing memories that may upset users. Ozner acknowledged that Dreambeans, for example, could generate stories involving people who have died. He compared the feature to controls in Google Photos, which allow users to limit the memories shown, and said users can tell the app to stop showing certain subjects.
Ozner told reporters that Google is exploring ways to make Dreambeans more practical and go beyond personalized stories and recommendations to allow users to act on the app’s suggestions.
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