Daybreak - Bollywood wants to offend nobody. AI is happy to help

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

In India, even the phantom of the censor board is enough to make filmmakers rewrite scenese at the very last minute, including those making shows for streaming platforms the board doesn't cover. A startup from Bengaluru called Neuralgarage says it has a fix. It's AI solution changes a line according to the way in which actor's lips move.In this piece, Shiveka Bakshi looks at how it works, why well-known production houses are using it, and what it says about the film industry today. This is a read aloud of a newsletter edition of Trade Tricks, by Rachel Varghese on Daybreak by The Ken.📖 Read the full story on The Ken: Bollywood wants to offend nobody. AI is happy to help Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In the 2006 campy action thriller movie, Snakes on a plane, Samuel L. Jackson has a line that was famous even before the movie came out. His character says that he has had it with the snakes on the plane. And of course, being Samuel L Jackson, he uses a swear word to say so, which is why I can't say it here. And similar to how I can't repeat Jackson's vocabulary, the word was a problem for the movie when it eventually aired on TV. So, the TV edit has the line replaced.

And Jackson says that he has had it with the monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday to Friday plane. This version actually became popular in its own right, because it's so ridiculous. It's just not what Jackson would have said. The words don't quite match the way his mouth moves and feels misplaced in the movie. Now, what if I told you that if the film was released in 2026, there may have been an easy way to make that dialogue change.

And it's likely that you would have never noticed. Turns out, in India, filmmakers and shows on streaming are already changing words and lines with this method. Sometimes they're even doing this at the very last minute because they're scared of censorship and not necessarily just from the CBFC or the Central Board of Film Certification. A startup in Bangalore has built an AI tool for exactly these changes.

And it's already been used on some releases you may recognize. So how does it work and what makes Bollywood reach for it? To find out, I'm going to be reading my colleague Shaveka Bakshi's edition from the Ken's subscriber-only newsletter called Trade Tricks. The piece is titled, Bollywood wants to offend nobody, AI is happy to help. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Trey Shivaki's, and every day of the week.

my co-host, Nikash Raman and I will bring you one news story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 12th of October. In Plato's Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher banished the artist from his ideal nation in 375 BC. More than 2,000 years later, the artist remains no less under scrutiny. Last week, the Central Board of Film Certification, or the CBFC, released a new set of rules under the Cinematograph Act. making guidelines even stricter for films. But amidst the hubbub of perfecting the film, even OTT platforms, which do not formally fall under the ambit of the CBFC,

put themselves through rigorous self-censorship, governed only by the open-ended, vaguely worded, 2021 IT rules. Take, for example, the scramble in GeoHodestar's Special Ops 2, released in 2025-to-released in 2025 to make last-minute changes to a specific dialogue. Pacing across a busy computer lab, the main antagonist, Sudhir Avasti,

played by Tahir Raj Bhassin, calls India the largest user of OBI. He means to allude to a widely popular, broad-based digital payment system in the context of an impending cyber attack. The original hook of the scene, however, was a far more obvious, familiar choice, UPI. Shibabrata Debram,

co-founder and chief technology officer at Bangalore-based startup, Neural Garage, explained that the producers wanted to avoid the suggestion that the UPI infrastructure could be hacked. A few years ago, in the face of a similar problem, the show's editors would have had three choices before them, all carrying the risk of distancing the viewer from the story at hand. Replacing the dubbed audio while retaining the original footage, doing away with the scene altogether, or adding a disclaimer. In this instance, Neural Garage insists that it has designed a far less choppy solution,

using AI to match the actor's jaw muscles and lips with newly dubbed audio. Debnat told me that attention is scarce, and we are not a captive audience anymore. The producer wants to avoid any distraction. The company had used its own generative AI process called Visualdub.aI for this special ops-2 scene. Now, the CPFC's inner workings have long been shouted in opacity. The Indian Express reported early last month that the CPFC does not follow its own set of rules, having retained the same 12 members since 2017 and having reconvened after nearly seven years in 2026.

board numbers, by the way, are supposed to serve three-year terms. Data visualization platform diagram chasing's archive CBFC Watch makes it clear that the board has silently put strict guardrails around ordinary citizens' access to information about the number and types of changes it orders in each theatrically released film. Yet, even the Phantom of the Board, which takes the form of a looming fear of violence or legal action, is enough to force filmmakers to scramble to rework scenes at the last second, including those who create content for the digital platforms beyond the CBFC's ambit. Consider, the police complained a Shiv Sena member launched against Netflix in 2020 for defaming the country with shows like Sacred Games and Leila. Or how the VHP's protest against the film Anapurani in 2024 forced Netflix to actually take

it down. My colleague Debanjli described the gradual taming of Netflix in detail a couple months ago. She wrote, and I'm quoting here, Rahul Mitra, an actor and producer, said that Netflix was the roles royce of content platforms among filmmakers. Premium, big budget, unmatched international reach. That has now given way to family-friendly content with a wide appeal as well as casual lean-back shows that are easy to make and easier still to consume. Part of it stems from the rising censorship pressures on all OTT platforms. The other part, though, has to do with Netflix India's attempts to keep growing,

boistering both its daily users and finances. Plus, movie economics are also brutal enough to push creators onto the fix-all bandwagon that is AI-powered filmmaking, as I reported early last month. It is already very difficult for most producers to secure funding or debt for their ventures. And the vast majority of completed projects are bound to flop. Scarcely anyone would have the appetite to deal with a mob-mediated legal fallout on top of all that. This is a throbbing pulse that Neural Garage has managed to put a finger on. Dialogue correction usually takes place at the 11th hour,

when one small mistake escapes everyone's notice on Z. Devnath explained, and I'm quoting here, at that point in time, the client is, I wouldn't say desperate, but very eager to try things out. This gives you a good entry point because you can deliver something at a crucial stage. Filmmakers know that lip-syned footage feels far more real and lived in than dubbed audio superimposed over existing video.

Neural garages cross-lingual lip syncing builds on the universal relationship between phonemes which are the blocks of sound that constitute every word and wizemes which are the corresponding lip shapes This bond is actually language agnostic You see whether you say pink in English or Pheela which is first in Hindi your lips are going to press together to make the same per sound

After being trained on billions of data points visual dub's algorithm can derive from an exhaustive phoneme-wise map. It has scaffolded the technical promise here with a keen awareness of the informal, closed-in, trust-based ways of the Hindi film industry. Apart from capitalizing on last-minute pressure, the five-year-old Bangalore-based startup learned whom it should target. Deibna told us that his first production house was Dharma Productions,

and getting such clients may be difficult, but he said that it is worth the effort because it earns the trust of others. Venture capital firm Xfinity Ventures led Neural Garage's $1.45 million seed funding round four years ago. But as a company that has yet to close its series A funding, it has managed to get other well-known players on board fairly quickly, the likes of Excel Entertainment, Yashraj films and Madoc films. In fact, Deibnath told me that, that for Excel's 2025 film 120 Bahadur,

they changed several sensitive character and location names, a request that might also have been censor-related. Deidnaad also said that it's a very high-frequency use case. The quantum of work may be very little from the company's end, only one or two words per film, but those words hold a lot of value. He said that this is also an entry point to the rest of the company's services. larger order values are associated with lip-syncing an entire film into another language.

The company recently put together a Telugu language version of War II, the Riddik Roshan star starved from 2025, which was originally shot in Hindi. Devnaat also positions this as an alternative to expensively redoing entire scenes, which involves reassembling cast and crew members and redesigning entire sets. Visual dub, he believes, can significantly reduce the reshoot burden. But Senthel Nayagam, the founder of Chennai-based Moorneum AI Studios, explained that reshoots are uncommon for this category of dialogue error anyway. So, from that point of view, it may not make sense to compare before and after financials here,

though the main proposition still stands. Making change dialogues look and sound far more consistent than. before. And in an environment that forces people to self-censor before the upholders of public morality take matters into their own hands, that is a neat promise. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription unlocks daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcasts. Head to the Ken.com and click on the subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by me,

Rachel Wirtkes and edited by Arna Prakash.