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.