Google has launched Dreambeans, its experimental AI app, in India, the first country outside the United States to get it. The company is betting on the world's second-largest internet market to bring its personalized visual stories to a wider audience.
Which languages does Dreambeans support in India?
On Monday, Google expanded the app, which is available on Android and iOS, to India with support for 13 local languages. Those include Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali, along with English. The launch came less than two months after Google made Dreambeans available to all eligible U.S. users aged 18 and older.
How does Dreambeans use data from Google services?
Dreambeans debuted in June. It pulls information from connected Google services, including Calendar, Gemini, Gmail, Photos, Search and YouTube, and uses it to generate illustrated stories about a user's interests and daily life. Users don't have to type a prompt. The app started with static, AI-generated illustrations, but Google recently added a feature that uses its Veo video-generation model to animate images in some stories.
Google picked India because of strong interest from Indian users who wanted access to the app, and because so many people there use its services. Product manager Gozde Oznur said during a press briefing that India stood out for the high overlap of users across Gemini, Gmail and Google Photos.
How has Dreambeans performed in the U.S.?
The U.S. numbers tell a more mixed story. Dreambeans has recorded nearly 55,000 downloads in the U.S. since June, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which shared the data with TechCrunch. About 63% of those downloads came in September, when Google opened the app to all eligible U.S. adults. Downloads then fell 84% from the previous month to about 5,500 in October.
Sensor Tower's figures also put the app's early performance in context. In the first 30 days after the September expansion, Dreambeans logged an estimated 29,000 downloads. Meta's Muse had 7.4 million in its first 30 days, ChatGPT had 2.8 million, Grok Bot had 362,000 and Claude had 155,000 during their own launch periods. Those are general-purpose chatbots, though. Dreambeans is built to generate personal stories rather than answer a wide range of questions.
Language may be a hurdle in India. Users can select only one language at a time for their stories. The app can draw on information from Google services in multiple languages, but it cannot yet generate stories that mix languages. That is a real limitation in a country where many people switch between Hindi and English, often blending the two in what is commonly called Hinglish. Oznur confirmed the restriction during the briefing.
Dreambeans' dependence on users' Google accounts also raises privacy questions. The app relies on Google's Personal Intelligence technology to pull from connected services. Those services can hold sensitive information that some users may not want to share with an AI app, even in exchange for more personalized content.
Oznur said users can choose which Google services to connect and disconnect them at any time. They can also delete their Dreambeans data within the app. She said information deleted from the underlying services is also removed from Dreambeans' personalization system. Users can ask the app to avoid certain subjects, including business-related information, and Dreambeans will try to adjust. Oznur said the app is available only to personal Gmail account holders, not enterprise users, and that generated stories are visible only to the account holder.
The proactive design also means the app could resurface painful memories. Oznur acknowledged that Dreambeans could generate stories involving people who have died. She said users can tell the app to stop showing certain subjects, and she compared that control to the settings in Google Photos that let people limit which memories appear.
Oznur also told reporters that Google is exploring ways to make Dreambeans more useful beyond storytelling. The company wants the app to offer recommendations and help users act on its suggestions. She did not give a timeline for those changes.
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