Red FM Will Clone Its RJs As AI Digital Twins With AskSila
Red FM has signed AskSila to build AI digital twins of its radio jockeys, extending their voices into round-the-clock interactions with listeners.
- Agreement: a Memorandum of Understanding, initial term 36 months, automatic renewal subject to annual review
- Rights: AskSila can build and deploy digital twins for Red FM's RJs nationally
- Proof of concept: a pilot that made a working twin of Director and COO Nisha Narayanan
- Reach: more than 40 million listeners across 68 cities, in Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese, Telugu, Malayalam and other languages
- Also extends to Red FM's on-ground live event properties
Radio, And Red FM Specifically, Is A Good Fit For This
Of all the media that could be cloned, radio talent is the most technically tractable. The entire product is a voice, there are years of clean recorded audio to train on, and listeners already have a relationship with the person without ever having seen them. There is no face to get wrong.
The commercial logic is equally clear. An RJ works a shift. The audience does not. A twin that answers at two in the morning is selling the one thing the format has never been able to supply, which is availability.
The Executives Are Careful About One Word
Both sides went out of their way to say replicate rather than replace. Tarun Singhal, Senior Growth Leader at AskSila, put it this way:
"Every RJ on Red FM has spent years building something no algorithm can fake: real trust with real listeners. What we're building with AskSila is a way to scale that trust, not synthesize it."
Narayanan tied it to the network's regional positioning, saying AI is not about automating away authenticity but a tool to scale human warmth, and that the next phase of India's growth lies beyond the metros where the on-air voices understand the pulse best.
The framing is doing real work here, because the same technology described slightly differently is a cost-reduction story about needing fewer hours of human presenter. Which of those it turns out to be is not decided by the press release. It is decided by what the twins are eventually asked to do, and neither company has said.
The Question Nobody Has Answered Yet
A 36-month agreement covering RJs across the country raises the consent question directly: an RJ's voice is their livelihood and their portable asset, and a twin of it outlives their contract. AskSila's own pitch includes IP protection technology alongside the twin, which suggests both parties know this is where the difficulty sits.
What has not been made public is the part that matters to the talent: whether individual RJs opt in, what they are paid when their twin works, and what happens to the twin when they leave for a rival network. The Indian industry is actively working through consent, compensation and control on exactly this, and this deal is large enough to become a reference point for how it gets settled.
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