Google has launched its experimental AI app Dreambeans in India, marking the first time the app has entered a market outside of the United States. Google hopes to leverage this second-largest internet market in the world to bring personalized visual stories generated based on users' digital activities to a broader audience.
Google will expand Dreambeans to the Indian market on Monday. The app can be used on Android and iOS, and it supports 13 local languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali, as well as English. This launch comes less than two months after Google made the app available to all eligible American users over the age of 18.
Dreambeans was launched in June. It utilizes information from connected Google services, including Calendar, Gemini, Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube, to automatically generate personalized illustrated stories related to users' interests and daily lives without the need for users to enter prompts. The app initially provided static AI generated illustrations, but Google has recently added a new feature that uses its video generation model Veo to add animated effects to the images in some stories.
Google stated that the reason for choosing India as the first international market for Dreambeans is due to the strong interest of Indian users in obtaining the app, as well as the widespread use of Google services in the region. Google Product Manager Gozde Oznur mentioned at a media briefing that there is a high overlap among Indian users using Gemini, Gmail, and Google Photos, which is particularly notable.
According to the estimation data provided by market intelligence company Sensor Tower to TechCrunch, since its launch in June, Dreambeans has had nearly 55,000 downloads in the United States. Approximately 63% of these downloads occurred in September, when Google made the app available to all eligible American users over the age of 18. However, in October, the number of downloads dropped by 84% compared to September, to around 5,500 downloads.
According to estimates from Sensor Tower, in the first 30 days after Google made Dreambeans available to all eligible American users, the app recorded approximately 29,000 downloads. In contrast, Muse of Meta saw 7.4 million downloads in its first 30 days, ChatGPT had 2.8 million downloads, Grok Bot recorded 362,000 downloads, and Claude had 155,000 downloads. However, unlike these general-purpose AI applications, Dreambeans focuses on generating personalized stories rather than responding to a wide range of user inquiries.
Although Dreambeans supports a variety of languages widely used in India, users can only select one language for the generated story at a time. Oznur stated at a briefing that the application is capable of accessing information in multiple languages from various Google services, but it is currently not possible to generate stories that mix multiple languages.
This may limit the attractiveness of Dreambeans in India, as many people there frequently switch between different languages, including Hindi and English, and often use them interchangeably. This practice is commonly referred to as Hinglish.
The reliance on users' Google account information by Dreambeans has also raised questions regarding privacy and data access. This application utilizes Google's Personal Intelligence technology to extract information from connected services and personalize the stories generated by AI. These services may contain sensitive personal information, and some users may not be willing to share such information with a AI application merely for the sake of personalized content.
Oznur indicates that users can choose which Google services to connect to Dreambeans at their own discretion and can disconnect at any time. Users can also delete their own Dreambeans data within the application. In addition, she stated that information deleted from the already connected services at the underlying level will also be removed from the personalization system of Dreambeans.
Oznur also indicates that users can tell Dreambeans to avoid certain topics, including business-related information, and the application will try to adjust the generated stories accordingly. She added that Dreambeans is currently only available to individual Gmail account holders and is not intended for corporate users, and the generated stories are only visible to the account holders themselves.
The automatic generation method of Dreambeans also carries the risk of evoking uncomfortable memories for users. Oznur acknowledges that, for example, Dreambeans may generate stories involving deceased individuals. She stated that users can request the application to stop displaying certain topics, and compared this feature to the control options in Google Photos that limit which memories are displayed.
Oznur told reporters that Google is exploring ways to make Dreambeans more actionable, moving beyond personalized stories and recommendations to help users take action based on application suggestions.
