Pocket FM now lets Hindi writers in India create AI audio series in a single click

Pocket Entertainment co-founder Prateek Dixit told Moneycontrol that when they launched AI audio series, they had also wanted to introduce it for Hindi language, which has both the platform’s largest writer community and its largest listener base. However, at the time, Hindi AI voice synthesis was not yet perfect.

"We worked with ElevenLabs to improve Hindi AI voice for the last 6 to 12 months. As a result of that, we have reached a point where the Hindi AI voice is now as good as English," Dixit said.

He added that tonality was one of the key areas the company focused on while introducing Hindi support. "Tonality differs a lot when you listen to a Hindi audio series compared to an English one, especially across genres like fantasy, romance, horror, and crime," he said.

Plans to expand AI audio series to Tamil and Telugu

Dixit noted that the company is working on expanding its AI audio series feature to Indian languages such as Tamil and Telugu, as well as international languages like German.

Last year, he said that AI Audio Series has helped the firm improve its production efficiency by significantly cutting down the production time and cost.

"We can now produce more than 10x of content that we previously could do with similar quality," he told Moneycontrol.

Pocket Entertainment's AI creator suite push

This launch is part of a larger AI creator suite that the Bengaluru-based startup is building to help budding writers brainstorm, draft, and experiment faster, while accelerating story production.

The suite also includes products such as Atlas, which enables writers to convert and adapt their stories into 10 regional and international languages, and CoPilot, an AI-powered writing assistant that helps writers develop high-quality stories and scripts.

"Within CoPilot, we're going to focus a lot on training our own fiction models. Can we build the world’s best serialised fiction models? That’s one of the biggest parts of building CoPilot," Dixit said.

As part of its future roadmap, Pocket Entertainment also aims to simulate a fiction writer room through the CoPilot tool. "The way movies and web series are written, they all have a fiction writer room, with a head writer, a junior writer, a critic, and a director. Now the idea is if we can simulate a similar concept in AI," he said.

Blaze, an AI-powered studio that helps creators convert their text content into comics, is also part of the suite.

"Another area we are investing in is AI video, that can generate an animated video from a script. That's one of the core capabilities we’re working on," Dixit said.

He added that post-production and mastering capabilities will also form a key vertical of the AI creator suite.

"At this point, these products are going to be free, but we eventually plan to make this tool public for anyone to use, not just Pocket writers. It also gives us an opportunity to fine-tune these products. There’s no plan to make these tools paid in the near future," Dixit said.

Pocket FM in a nutshell

Pocket FM is the flagship product of Pocket Entertainment, which also operates the bite-sized online novel app Pocket Novel, the AI-first webcomics platform Pocket Toons, and the micro-drama app Pocket TV.

The service offers more than 100,000 audio series, spanning genres such as romance, drama, thriller, fantasy and science fiction.

The platform claims to have over 200 million listeners who on average spend more than 120 minutes a day.

Started by Dixit, Rohan Nayak and Nishanth KS, Pocket Entertainment was last valued at $750 million when it raised $103 million in March 2024. It has raised $196.5 million to date.

For FY25, Pocket Entertainment recorded a 68 percent increase in revenue at Rs 1,768 crore. The growth was driven by strong momentum across India, the US and Europe markets, along with an expanded content catalogue and improved monetisation.