Google’s ‘Dreambeans’ App Generates 'News Stories' Based on Your Life

Credit: Google

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News aggregators are good at keeping you hooked. It's impossible to look at every story in your feed, so you continue to scroll until you can no longer stand looking at your phone. But it seems Google has an alternative pitch: an app that generates personalized "news" stories based on what's going on in your life—an app that's intended to curb your scrolling, not enable it.

How Google's new "Dreambeans" app works

Google Labs announced "Dreambeans" on Wednesday. The idea is this: You connect all your Google apps to Dreambeans—Gmail, Calendar, Photos, YouTube, or your account's Search history—and it pores over your messages, calendars, what have you, looking for events or activities that are important to you. From there, it generates faux articles that you can learn from, and which are directly tied to the happenings in your personal life. You only need to connect one app to get things working, but Google's pitch makes it seem like the more apps you connect, the better the article output will be.

Here's an example from Google: You receive an email confirming that your dog's training treat order is on the way. Dreambeans sees this when looking through your Gmail inbox, and generates a story featuring tips for using the treats to properly train your dog. In another example, Dreambeans taps into Google Calendar and sees you have a friend visiting town this weekend. Because Dreambeans knows you have a dog, it decides to generate a story highlighting dog-friendly restaurants near your house that you and your friend could try—along with your pet, of course.

If you decide you're interested in any particular Dreambeans story, you're able to "dive deeper." Google says Dreambeans will pull information from the internet to add more context to the story, similar to how AI Overviews or AI Mode work in Search—maybe a story about using the training treats also contains information about local dog parks or nearby puppy training camps. Google says you can save any story to Dreambeans' library. As with other AI products, you're able to give Dreambeans feedback, which may adjust the story you're looking at or impact future story generations.

Google says that each of these stories comes with a "unique illustration," generated using Nano Banana 2. Dreambeans may even pull from your Google Photos library for these AI illustrations, if the story involves you or someone you know.

Why is it called Dreambeans?

The general concept makes sense: connect your apps and receive AI-generated stories about things that might matter to you. But what doesn't make much sense is the name: What does Dreambeans even mean?

Here's Google's explanation: Dreambeans is a combination of, you guessed it, "dream" and "beans." The "dream" part describes the way Dreambeans looks through your apps overnight to find things to "report" on. Those findings are then refined into "beans," the stories themselves. Sure Google.

Dreambeans isn't great for privacy

If you do decide to take Dreambeans for a spin, know that the app is not particularly focused on user privacy. The App Store listing's "App Privacy" page shows that Google collects the following data points from you and links them to your identity:

Purchases

Contact info

User Content

Identifiers

Diagnostics

Location

Contacts

Search History

Usage Data

Other Data

In addition, Dreambeans has access to any apps you connect to it. If you connect your Gmail, it can root through your inbox; if you connect YouTube, it sees your watch history. While Google says you can delete your Dreambeans data at any time, know what you're getting into. (Though, seeing as this is a Google product, the company already has much of this data across your other Google products.)

You can only try Dreambeans if you're a paid subscriber (for now)

As of this writing, Dreambeans is only available to AI Ultra subscribers who are 18 or older. As such, unless you're paying $100 per month for Google's most expensive AI subscription, you won't be able to use Dreambeans just yet.

Still, the rest of us will get the chance to try it sooner rather than later. Google's official Dreambeans website has a waitlist that all users with a Google Account can add their names to. The app itself is currently available to download on iOS and Android.