Dreambeans is a Fun and Vaguely Creepy Fever Dream and I Can’t Get Enough ⭐

Dreambeans is a unique Google Labs experiment that ably demonstrates the pros and cons of AI in the most Googly way imaginable. I suppose the name was the first tip-off to the quirkiness that awaits the user within. But it's even quirkier than is immediately obvious. And I may just love it.

I wrote about the release of Dreambeans to all users in the U.S. last week, but it had come up the day before when I mentioned that the Gemini Daily Brief was likewise available to all users in the U.S. on Windows Weekly: Leo had been testing the app through a Google AI subscription and showed it off a bit during the show.

While Dreambeans and Gemini Daily Brief aren't quite the same thing, they are both interesting examples of how AI can synthesize data from across different sources and then present some set of recommendations. But there's more.

Sticking just with Google's offerings, the most basic of these types of solutions is perhaps CC, the AI experiment that Google Labs released last December. I signed up for this service when it was announced, and it basically connects to your Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and the web, and uses that information to create a "Your Day Ahead" briefing that arrives in your Gmail inbox every morning.

CC was borderline useless for the first several months of availability, and I quickly learned to just scan and archive the email it sent each morning. But it's gotten a bit better since then. Plus, I signed up with my Gmail account, not my main Workspace account, and the latter is where all my important things happen via email and calendar. Today, for example, it told me that my schedule was clear, but I have a three-hour Windows Weekly recording to deal with that it doesn't know about.

Gemini Daily Brief feels like a formal productization of CC, but with the correct (Gemini) branding and an expanded set of connections. Gemini Daily Brief is delivered as a notification from the Gemini app on mobile, but you can also find it in the Gemini sidebar across platforms, including the web. Since I connected this to my Workspace data in addition to just personal Gmail, it's a lot more useful than CC. But as noted, it can also connect to, and do, more. I see things in there tied to Google searches, which is interesting, and I like how it segregates its to-do type information into Top of mind, FYI, and Looking ahead groups.

I find Gemini Daily Brief to be curiously useful.

Some of the information it chooses to surface is superfluous, of course, like the suggestion today that I "discover the illustrators behind iconic album art ... Your lookups of famous record sleeves have deepened into researching specific artists like Patrick Nagel." This was triggered by some random Google search, I guess, but it was a one-off question and not a topic I care to spend more time on.

Some of the information it surfaces is, of course, quite useful. If you've been following my Pixel trade-in drama--described in A Bad...