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Pocket FM cuts production cost using AI, generates over 50,000 shows

Pocket FM cuts production cost using AI, generates over 50,000 shows

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PTI
New Delhi, Jul 20 (PTI) Audio entertainment platform Pocket FM on Sunday said it has significantly reduced production costs through its proprietary artificial intelligence systems.
The company has scaled its content operations significantly over the past year, producing over 50,000 AI-generated shows, a statement said.
'We are transforming Pocket FM into an AI-led entertainment company, with artificial intelligence now driving content creation, productivity, and global storytelling at scale," said Rohan Nayak, co-founder and CEO of Pocket FM.
'AI is helping us unlock high quality content faster and more efficiently than ever before. Our content costs have been significantly reduced, while creator efficiency has increased tenfold." Known for pioneering long form episodic audio storytelling, Pocket FM has built custom AI infrastructure that enables creators from scripting and voice generation to sound design and multi language localization.
These capabilities have significantly enhanced speed to market while maintaining narrative depth and production quality, it stated.
At the heart of this transformation is a seamless collaboration between human creativity and AI precision, enabling Pocket FM to produce great stories at scale without compromising on quality, the statement said.
The company reported Rs 1,768 crore in revenue for FY25, a 68 per cent year-on-year increase, and is now profitable across core markets.
Launched in 2018, Pocket FM is an AI-powered entertainment platform creating scalable storytelling experiences across audio, text, and visual formats.
Operating in India, the US, and Europe, with ongoing Latin American expansion, it builds borderless IP ecosystems through Pocket Entertainment. Its content spans English, Hindi, Spanish, German, and French.
A recent FICCI EY report projects India's audio entertainment sector to reach USD 2.5 billion by 2030, with AI first platforms like Pocket FM poised to lead this transformation. PTI KKS ANU ANU
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July 20, 2025, 11:30 IST
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Through this project and platform, that is what he has given himself, and what he has given others as well: a sense of escape and freedom for those of us who feel a certain dissonance or discomfort with particular fields, discourses and platforms, and with the hierarchy of values they reinforce. In my case, the academic world which increasingly rewards visibility, citation counts, self-promotion (and self-importance!), buzzwords and 'buzz-genres'! But once academia is dictated by arithmetic success, quantitative impact, and competition – once it becomes a field of power in a sense – it doesn't just lose its purpose, it also becomes tedious. Saikat Majumdar (SM): I knew Amit Chaudhuri for quite a while by that time and also knew of his discontent with the literary culture of our time trapped between the dishonest commercialism of the mainstream and the narrow instrumentalism of academia. So it was exciting to see him launch a series of interventions to do something different. What made you agree to be part of the project? Were there intersections of intellectual ambition and creative-critical concerns between your work and the Literary Activism project? CB: I admire the work of Amit Chaudhuri, as an essayist and literary activist as much as a poet and novelist. We saw the strains of 'literary activism' in each other's work. Coming perhaps from different cultural spheres, East and West, we found we had more in common than those closer to hand. So, this gives me confidence that we can have a non-national exchange, and I use that word rather than trans-national or even international. We are beside one another. JC: I liked its openness to a variety of contributions from writers, academics, artists, film-makers, etc, and the resonance of the topics chosen for each of the symposia. I have a long-standing interest in the relations between the creative and the critical in my work as a critic and biographer, so, yes, there were many intersections. I felt we needed a new way of thinking about literature and its value in a period after the dominance of literary theory and the emergence of creative writing as a university discipline. The Literary Activism project offered a route into this new way of thinking. LZ: What I find so compelling, so necessary about the literary activism platform/project is that it has also restored a sense of delight: the delight in listening to one another and in thinking together; the delight in witnessing the unfolding of critical thought and minds; the delight in paying close attention to texts and to voices, and the delight in the discovery and the encounter of many new texts, voices, personalities; the delight also in being able to say, or hear and share: 'I don't give a damn' (remember: ' f*ck storytelling '!) SM: As a writer who is part of academia, but also someone who works in the literary sphere run by mainstream presses and newspapers, this felt personally connected to me. As someone who writes novels, scholarly criticism, literary essays and op-ed articles, I've long ceased to see any difference between the critical and the artistic. They are for me simply different genres of imaginative writing, such as poetry, prose, and verse. The Literary Activism seemed to feel the same way, and brought together people who felt likewise. Why do you think the Literary Activism project seemed urgent, timely and necessary ten years ago? What has it achieved, if anything at all, in these ten years? CB: In my most recent book, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies, I included several key works from Literary Activism: three short works of poetics and a long essay 'Up Against Storytelling' that comes in response to Chaudhuri's conference on that subject. So 'Literary Activism' has become one of the main forums for my work. JC: See above for my thoughts about timeliness and urgency. It has created a space between the academy and the marketplace where there can be serious, witty, open-minded thinking about what it means to write now and what needs to be resisted if a certain idea of literary value is to be both defended and developed. LZ: Chaudhuri has been able to gather around him a community of wonderfully talented people who, precisely, do not take themselves seriously, but who delight in each other's company. It's also in many ways a community of friendship. In the symposia that he organises, there is a real spirit of conviviality, and there is often humour as well, but it never comes at the expense of the gravity and sometimes the difficulty of certain questions and discussions. For me, that space of 'escape and freedom' – even just knowing it exists and persists: 10 years! – has been deeply sustaining. SM: Literature is the most intellectual of all art forms and the most artistic of all intellectual discourses. Consequently, literature and creative writing have easily found a core place at the university, amidst academic disciplines – more than filmmaking, visual or performative arts. This has also made it vulnerable to the malaises of academia. On the other hand, as an art form (at least in principle if no longer in reality), it has also inherited the ailments of the free market as we have moved through neoliberalism. These peculiar features and locations of literary culture made the Literary Activism project timely ten years ago – and it remains timely 10 years later as both academic and free-market cultures continue to move through transformative crises in the 21st century. Already facing this transformative crisis early in the 21st century, literature had more identity problems than one could imagine, and the Literary Activism project had put its fingers on several of them. It has certainly achieved the reality of a persistent set of interrogations. I would love to see it taken up more organically by different stakeholders in literary culture worldwide. What are the things you'd like to see Literary Activism being involved in? JC: I'm not sure it needs to be involved in anything but its own development. There is a valuable website called Creative/Critical and an associated book imprint. It might be worth connecting with them to raise the profile of the thinking underway in the Literary Activism project. But I don't want to lose the polemical edge of Literary Activism. The danger of market hyperbole is matched by the bland conformity of academic discourse. The LA project successfully resists both. What are your thoughts, if any, on the Literary Activism imprint? CB: The books extend the work of the meetings and the website is a necessary way. Because, in the end, books still serve to ground our discourse. JC: It strikes me as a valuable initiative. SM: I think we are becoming people with rapidly receding literary and cultural memories. We're now ruthlessly presentist, and almost immediately, ruthlessly futurist too. But literature and culture are nothing without the past, and memory and affection for it. One key thing the Literary Activism imprint does is to revive thoughts, archives, and books that we need to remember and re-remember. This is something I tried to do with a column I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books from 2020 to 2022, 'Another Look at India's Books'. The books published in the new imprint are exquisite, and the plainness of their covers is a bold statement. What does the Literary Activism project – and its timeline – say about our literary culture? CB: We are in a post-post-colonial world. Those of us working with 'Literary Activism' are peers engaged in exchange. For me, that means learning more about West Bengali literature and culture, and more generally Indian culture – beginnng to have a deeper and more resonant sense of the full resources of 20th century thinking and poetics. So then, in the 21st century, I am less hamstrung by the pervasive parochialism and underdevelopment of American culture. 'Literary Activism' wakes me up to the world. JC: The marketisation of literature and writers continues with very little understanding of what might be lost in this process. Since the Literary Activism project began this has been increasingly informed by the presence of social media and, more recently, AI. In the process a certain kind of literary experience is likely to disappear. We need to resist this disappearance and the Literary Activism project offers a way of doing so.

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