Google’s Dreambeans App Generates “news Stories” Based on Your Life.
News aggregators are great at keeping your attention. It’s impossible to see every news item in your feed, so you keep scrolling until you’re tired of looking at your phone. But it seems Google has an alternative: an app that generates personalized “news” based on events in your life—an app designed to curb your scrolling, not encourage it.
How Google’s new “Dreambeans” app works
On Wednesday, Google Labs announced “Dreambeans.” The idea is this: you connect all your Google apps to Dreambeans—Gmail, Calendar, Photos, YouTube, or your account search history—and the system analyzes your messages, calendars, and other items, looking for events or activities that are important to you. Based on these, it generates pseudo-articles that you can benefit from and that are directly related to events in your personal life. You only need to connect one app to work, but Google says the more apps you connect, the better the resulting articles will be.
Here’s an example from Google: You receive an email confirming that your order of dog training treats is on its way. Dreambeans sees this by scanning your Gmail inbox and generates a story with tips on how to properly use treats to train your dog. In another example, Dreambeans uses Google Calendar and sees that a friend is coming to visit for the weekend. Since Dreambeans knows you have a dog, it decides to generate a story highlighting dog-friendly restaurants near your home that you and your friend could visit—with your pet, of course.
If you’re interested in a particular Dreambeans story, you can “dive deeper.” Google claims Dreambeans will pull information from the web to add context to the story, similar to how AI reviews or AI-powered search work—for example, a story about using treats for training might also include information about local dog parks or nearby puppy training camps. Google says you can save any story to the Dreambeans library. As with other AI products, you can leave feedback on Dreambeans, which may adjust the story you’re viewing or influence future story generations.
Google claims that each of these stories comes with a “unique illustration” created using the Nano Banana 2. Dreambeans can even use your Google Photos library for these AI-generated illustrations if the story is about you or someone you know.
Why is it called Dreambeans?
The concept is clear: connect your apps and get AI-generated stories about things that might be important to you. But what’s a bit confusing is the name: what does Dreambeans even mean?
Here’s Google’s explanation: Dreambeans is a combination of, you guessed it, the words “dream” and “beans.” The “dream” part describes how Dreambeans combs through your apps overnight to find information for a “report.” This data is then processed and turned into “beans”—the stories themselves. Google, of course.
Dreambeans isn’t very good at privacy.
If you decide to try Dreambeans, be aware that the app isn’t particularly privacy-focused. The App Store’s “Privacy” page states that Google collects the following data about you and associates it with your identity:
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Purchases
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Contact information
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User-generated content
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Identifiers
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Diagnostics
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Location
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Contacts
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Search history
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Usage data
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Other data
Additionally, Dreambeans has access to all apps you connect to it. If you connect Gmail, it can access your email; if you connect YouTube, it can see your viewing history. While Google claims you can delete Dreambeans data at any time, be aware that this is a risk. (Although, since it’s a Google product, much of this data is already stored in your other Google products.)
Currently, only paid subscribers can try Dreambeans.
At the time of writing, Dreambeans is only available to AI Ultra subscribers over 18 years old. So, unless you’re paying $100 per month for Google’s most expensive AI subscription, you won’t be able to use Dreambeans yet.
However, the rest of us will have the opportunity to try it out quite soon. There’s a waitlist on the official Google Dreambeans website , where anyone with a Google account can add their name. The app itself is currently available for download on iOS and Android .