Ramayana producer details AI dubbing pipeline built on human voices, Namit Malhotra says actors and voice talent record first while machines stitch the lip-sync, Bollywood's costliest film draws the tool-or-replacement line by budget math

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Ramayana, the most expensive Indian film production to date, will premiere at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on October 27 before its theatrical and IMAX release on November 5. In an interview with ET Now, producer Namit Malhotra laid out exactly how the film's English dub was assembled — and the pipeline is more human than the industry's loudest arguments suggest.

The film was shot in Hindi with its cast, including Ranbir Kapoor as Lord Rama, Yash as Ravana, Sai Pallavi as Sita and Sunny Deol as Hanuman. For the English version, voice actors — sometimes the actors themselves — recorded the dialogue first, with the emotion and timing set by human performance. A tool the production built, called Brahma AI, then stitches that performance onto the actor's face, syncing lip movement to the recorded voice. The lip-sync work is supervised by people Malhotra calls "human drivers," because, as he put it, the best voice actor may not have the right face for the actor on screen. The English trailer, notably, used no AI at all — the main cast dubbed it themselves.

The film is reportedly being prepared for release in 40 languages, which is where the economics become visible. A dubbing pipeline that starts with human recordings and ends with machine-assisted lip-sync is not a statement of principle; it is a budget calculation by the person who carries the budget. Malhotra's framing — that human performances are "the backbone" of the film and that the technology exists to make the result feel "seamless" rather than to replace anyone — comes from a producer whose own money is on the screen. If the dub fails, his production fails.

The contrast with the surrounding industry is stark. A Quebec publisher this month dropped an author who passed off AI-generated prose as his own. Spotify's chief executive dismisses the AI-music threat to his platform while the flood of machine-made tracks fills its catalog. Regulators draft rules; unions issue declarations. Meanwhile the year's biggest Indian production simply describes what it does: humans first, machines second, and a human checking the mouth movements at the end.

The second part of the Ramayana saga, originally due in theatres on Diwali 2027, is reportedly delayed.