Google has launched its experimental AI app Dreambeans in India, marking its first expansion outside the United States.
The rollout, active on Monday, brings the Android and iOS app to India with support for 13 local languages. These include Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and English. This move follows a launch in the U.S. less than two months prior, which opened the app to all eligible users aged 18 and older.
Google introduced Dreambeans in June. The tool uses data from connected Google services, such as Calendar, Gemini, Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube, to generate personalized, illustrated stories about a user’s interests and daily life without needing a prompt. Initially, the app produced static images. Google recently added a feature using its Veo video-generation model to animate images in select stories.
Google selected India as its first international market due to strong user interest and widespread service adoption. India showed high overlap among users of Gemini, Gmail, and Google Photos, according to Gozde Oznur, a Google product manager who spoke at a press briefing.
Dreambeans recorded nearly 55,000 downloads in the U.S. since its June debut, based on estimates from Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch. About 63% of those downloads occurred in September when Google opened the app to all eligible U.S. users aged 18 and older. Downloads then dropped 84% month over month to roughly 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. This compares 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, according to Sensor Tower estimates. 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.
This limitation could restrict 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.
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 draw on connected services and personalize its AI-generated stories. Those services can contain sensitive personal information that some users may not want to share with an AI app just to receive personalized content.
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. Oznur further stated that information deleted from the underlying connected services is also removed from Dreambeans’ personalization system.
Users can tell Dreambeans to avoid certain subjects, including business-related information, and the app will try to adjust its stories accordingly. Oznur 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.
What it means
For people in India using the app, the immediate change is access to stories in local languages, though mixed-language content remains unsupported. Users retain control over which Google services feed the app and can delete their data or specific story topics at any time.
